Towards resilient networked microgrids: Blockchain-enabled peer-to-peer electricity trading mechanism

Abstract

Integrative various distributed generation in energy infrastructure have brought great opportunities in recent years. However, this integration has also led to critical challenges in energy management, such as congestion pricing and non-optimality of dispatch. To address these challenges, deregulation and decentralization of electricity market is one of the effective solutions. Although various deregulation schemes have been proposed in recent years, there still remain some serious challenges in achieving resilient management of real-time energy deregulation especially in the presence of disasters. To counter this issue, in this paper, we propose a model for a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) transactive microgrid where prosumers (Producer/ Consumer) can trade local generation with each other via a smart management system. Furthermore, in our proposed model, the energy trading is executed in a decentralized manner by leveraging Blockchain technologies. Among different Blockchain technologies, we adopt the Ethereum Blockchain in our work. The auction models for energy trading are proposed by incorporating a smart contract that is the essential component of the Blockchain. In our simulations, the proposed P2P energy trading model is evaluated.