A Blockchain-based Co-Simulation Platform for Transparent and Fair Energy Trading and Management

Abstract

With the rapid adoption of renewable energy and smart meters, more distributed energy consumers are becoming capable of generating energy and participating in energy trading. However, it raises great challenges to establish trust among these distributed energy sources. A more transparent and fair energy trading market is required. With its unique advantages in supporting fair and transparent transactions, blockchain is recognized as an effective solution to facilitate distributed energy transactions. However, existing studies often propose blockchain-based energy trading schemes without considering the management of energy generation, consumption, and transmission. In addition, the sensitive nature of the power grid may make the grid operators hesitate to adopt anyone to directly access the energy trading market. Therefore, in this study, we adopt a permission-based blockchain, Hyper-ledger Fabric, to establish a fair and transparent distributed energy trading market, due to its strong access control and efficient consensus mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed blockchain-based energy trading market is integrated with the Packetized Energy Management and Trading Co-Simulation platform (PEMT-CoSim), developed by our prior work, so that a holistic co-simulation platform is established to facilitate further studies by closely coordinating energy trading and management. The demonstration results based on the proposed blockchain-based co-simulation platform are discussed in detail, which validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.