CEnTrA: City-scale Energy Transaction Application for the Smart Grid

Abstract

Under the broader aegis of smart grid, the use of Distributed Ledger Technology to promote privacy, trust and security in peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing is gaining attention globally. However, implementation is limited to microgrid or neighbourhood level due to the challenges of scalability and performance associated with increase in number of prosumers. Therefore, the inclusion of stakeholders- producers to prosumers-require a scalable solution for advancing the information and energy exchange objectives. To this end, we propose CEnTrA, an application of sharding in blockchain to develop a novel hierarchical model capable of processing P2P energy sharing transactions at city-scale. CEnTrA is based on ChainSpace and takes advantage of the structure of the electrical grid to create a scalable network. The hierarchical model allows the use of customized transaction policies at different levels and locations of the grid. The results show that sharding increases transaction throughput by upto 59.52% in comparison to no sharding. Additionally, a location-based sharding model is presented that improves performance of multi-input transactions by 39.57% for 250 inputs in comparison to random sharding.