Public Blockchain in Support of Transactive Energy Markets

Abstract

Transactive Energy Markets (TEM) have the potential to reduce wasted energy, increase the utilisation of renewable energy resources and enable independence in the energy sector. Blockchain has been utilised in TEMs in the literature aiming to acquire transparency, security and trustless operations. Though public blockhain enables leveraged transparency and fairness, the majority of proposals suggest adoption of private or consortium blockchains mainly due to performance concerns. In this paper, we created a TEM environment where consumers, prosumers and suppliers bid for price agreement upon a game theory model and then deployed it on localised Ethereum blockchain infrastructure. To compare the performance, we created a centralized TEM environment keeping all the settings the same. The obtained results show that public blockchains may be adaptable to TEMs to enhance system transparency and fairness as well as automated and trustless transactions. Conducted test results show that our proposal exhibit a similar scalability trend as the referenced centralized system.