The rapid growth of distributed renewable energy penetration is promoting the evolution of the energy system toward decentralization and decentralized and digitized smart grids. This study was based on energy blockchain, and developed a dual-biding mechanism based on the real-time energy surplus and demand in the local smart grid, which is expected to enable reliable, affordable, and clean energy supply in smart communities. In the proposed system, economic benefits could be achieved by replacing fossil-fuel-based electricity with the high penetration of affordable solar PV electricity. The reduction of energy surplus realized by distributed energy production and P2P energy trading, within the smart grid results in less transmission loss and lower requirements for costly upgrading of existing grids. By adopting energy blockchain and smart contract technologies, energy secure trading with a low risk of privacy leakage could be accommodated. The prototype is examined through a case study, and the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed mechanism are further validated by scenario analysis.
Yan Li, Yan Li, Yuying Gong, Mingbo Wu · 7 authors
Abstract Blockchain technology is demonstrating vast potential in the realm of distributed energy transactions. This article employs the Ethereum platform to architect an energy trading settlement framework. By incorporating whitelists, authorization mechanisms, and dedicated energy tokens, transactions are rendered more secure and reliable, ensuring the openness, transparency, traceability, and immutability of transaction information. The proposed transaction settlement mechanism automatically updates users' energy imbalances and levies corresponding charges, thereby ensuring strict adherence to transaction contracts. Furthermore, during the settlement phase, smart contracts are employed to autonomously evaluate the creditworthiness of transaction parties, with results recorded on the blockchain. As the credit levels of the entities across the entire network increase, the block generation time for distributed energy trading blockchains becomes shorter, with the block generation time predominantly influenced by the credit rating of the highest-rated entity in the network. Hence, through smart contract design based on energy trading, blockchain technology is utilized to enhance the transparency and security of transaction settlement and clearing. Future research could focus on improving blockchain scalability, integrating emerging technologies, to advance the effectiveness and adoption of blockchain-based energy trading systems.
Akshay Chaudhary, Prateek Negi, Amit Dimari, Rohan Rohan
Energy suppliers, entrepreneurs, technological developers, financial organizations, national governments, and academics are interested in blockchains or distributed ledgers. Many of these sources believe blockchains may provide considerable advantages and innovation. Smart contracts and blockchains offer transparent, tamper-proof, and secure platforms that may allow new business solutions. This article covers core blockchain topics including system designs and distributed consensus techniques. From peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and Internet of Things (IoT) applications to decentralized markets, electric car charging, and e-mobility, opportunities, problems, and constraints are examined.
In Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading for the smart grid, secure and efficient information exchange is essential to protect against privacy risks and cyber threats. This paper introduces a multi-stage information protection scheme that safeguards data privacy, message authentication, and confidentiality in a continuous double auction (CDA)-based trading environment. The scheme functions across three phases: (1) In the home energy data collection stage, short-key homomorphic encryption within a decentralized framework secures user data. (2) During trading, an encryption-signature (E-S) model ensures secure transmission of sensitive bidding information from prosumers. (3) In the implementation phase, a decentralized monitoring system detects and prevents node compromise attacks on power measurements. Evaluations highlight the scheme’s computational feasibility, low time costs, and resilience against cyber-attacks, with tests on the IEEE 39-bus distribution network confirming its security. Furthermore, this scheme addresses limitations of traditional, operator-reliant methods in microgrids. With zero-knowledge proof-based authentication and homomorphic encryption for private energy pricing, the framework uses a lightweight, tree-chained transaction ledger to ensure data integrity. Tests confirm the framework’s support for secure, private energy trading with high accuracy and minimal delays. Lastly, the scheme addresses security and privacy challenges of IoT-integrated smart meters, critical for global energy management but vulnerable to data breaches. Through differential privacy-based aggregation and distributed data validation, the IoT model protects consumer privacy and ensures data integrity. In conclusion, this multi-faceted protection scheme strengthens privacy and security in P2P energy trading for the smart grid, enhancing data protection, system reliability, and user confidence in a decentralized energy landscape.
As the world increasingly adopts renewable energy, the importance of smart grids grows. Integrating renewable sources into the current grid presents technical and economic challenges. Blockchain technology offers a promising solution by enabling decentralized energy trading, allowing efficient exchanges between producers and consumers. This paper proposes a detailed framework for integrating blockchain into the smart grid. The framework includes developing a blockchain-based platform for energy trading, creating smart contracts to manage and automate transactions, and incorporating IoT devices for energy data collection and sharing. By leveraging blockchain's transparency, security, and decentralization, our proposed system aims to address inefficiencies and foster a more resilient energy infrastructure. This approach could enhance the sustainability and reliability of energy distribution, supporting the transition to renewable sources. We believe our framework has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency and sustainability of the smart grid, paving the way for a more robust and adaptive energy system capable of meeting future demands.
Distributed energy generation disrupts traditional energy markets by blurring the line between producers and consumers and enabling the emerging prosumers to trade energy in per-to-peer transactions. Blockchain technology automates peer-to-peer energy trades in a distributed database architecture that achieves security and cost-effectiveness using cryptographic hashing and consensus-based verification. Before its deployment, an energy blockchain trading application needs to be tested in a virtual environment that is analogous to the real-world setting to ensure correct implementation and identify potential obstacles and opportunities. This study suggests executing such a testing within a framework that integrates a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment with an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) simulation platform. The application of this testing framework to a case study of solar Photovoltaic (PV) energy trade among household peers in in Doha, Qatar, shows how the integration of the GIS environment offers a detailed analysis of transactions in local housing community markets. The ABM simulation reveals that population density, energy market prices, and household proximity significantly influence residential PV energy trading in Qatar. The ensuing simulation environment provides a decision-support platform for designing and implementing decentralized trading systems based on blockchain technology, and high-performance computing can enhance model performance for scalable energy blockchain analysis in Qatar and beyond.
As the demand for renewable energy grows, there is a need for efficient and transparent mechanisms to facilitate renewable energy trading. This research presents a novel Renewable Energy Trading Platform (RETP) that leverages blockchain technology to enable secure and decentralized energy trading. The platform utilizes distributed ledger technology to record and verify energy transactions, ensuring transparency and immutability. Smart contracts are employed to automate trade execution and settlement, eliminating the need for intermediaries and reducing transaction costs. The RETP integrates renewable energy data from various sources, such as smart meters and IoT devices, to enable accurate tracking and verification of energy production and consumption. Through the implementation of the RETP, energy producers can directly sell excess renewable energy to consumers, promoting the adoption of green energy and enhancing energy grid efficiency. A comprehensive evaluation of the platform demonstrates its efficiency, scalability, and security. The proposed RETP has the potential to revolutionize the renewable energy market by fostering peer-to-peer energy trading, empowering energy communities, and accelerating the transition to a sustainable energy future.
Arti Badhoutiya, K Sangamithrai, G. Indira, M. Suganya · 7 authors
The rise of distributed renewable energy microgrids presents new opportunities for localized energy generation, but also poses challenges in energy management, security, and transparency. This paper proposes a Blockchain-Enabled Energy Management System (EMS) for distributed renewable energy microgrids to address these challenges. By leveraging blockchain technology, the system facilitates secure and transparent energy transactions between microgrids, enabling peer-to- peer (P2P) energy trading without reliance on a central authority. Blockchain’s decentralized ledger ensures data integrity, enhances system resilience, and prevents unauthorized access, while optimizing energy distribution across the network. This approach promotes a sustainable and efficient energy ecosystem, ensuring trust and reliability in decentralized energy markets.
Imran Hussain, Hafiz Ashiq Hussain, Nasim Ullah, Stanislav Mišák
Conventional centralized optimization and management approaches may not work well in an emerging and distributed energy system with a high penetration of electric vehicles and green energy sources. The usage of blockchain technology is growing as a strong competitor as it can provide this kind of market with a transparent, secure, and efficient transactional platform. Nevertheless, most energy systems usually depend on complex mathematical optimization, which is poorly incorporated into blockchain applications. Moreover, time-sensitive message dissemination requirements, resource-intensiveness, high computational load, and communication overhead of the traditional blockchain consensus mechanisms make it difficult to connect with real-time vehicular networks. Here, we employ Proof of Intelligence (PoI), a novel prosumer-centric blockchain consensus mechanism to develop a comprehensive model of trust based on commitments of supply and demand through the application of peer-to-peer energy exchange with effective and dynamic integration of renewable sources and electric vehicles both in the day ahead and real-time energy trading platforms. Additionally, the PoI smart contract is developed to seamlessly incorporate mathematical optimization with an increased level of security, scalability, throughput, and low confirmation latency of transactions achieved through the reduced effort involved in finding and confirming the optimal solution in comparison with conventional blockchain consensus mechanisms.
Julia Groza, Seyyed Ali Sadat, Koami Soulemane Hayibo, Joshua M. Pearce
To assist electric utilities to overcome limitations of centralized billing and encourage distributed production of solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity, this study designs and assesses a novel open-source autonomous virtual utility to monitor users and enable peer-to-peer trading. This study provides system design and software implementation of the concept using blockchain technology written in Solidity and Truffle. A set of smart contracts adds users to a system and monitors their demand, PV generation, and facilitates transactions between users on an hourly basis when one user has PV-generated excess electricity, and another has demand. Unit tests for each of the contracts’ methods are developed in Solidity, and data on gas usage and costs is collected. Once the contracts have been written and evaluated, a JavaScript simulation is developed to use the contracts on real load and PV generation data for one year on an hourly basis. The results of two case studies are quantified: 1) true peers, where all houses are prosumers with rooftop PV, and 2) intermittent transition case, where PV deployment and demand are more varied. The results found that with ten users in the system, the true peers case study resulted in an uneconomic number of exchanges, but the intermittent transition case study resulted in more than a factor of twenty increases in exchanges and net cost savings. The savings more than doubles for both cases when time of use pricing is in effect. The system utility increases with more variability of PV production across participating users and is recommended for utilities targeting increases in distributed generation during the energy transition.
Abdullah Umar, Deepak Kumar, T. K. Ghose, Thamer A. H. Alghamdi · 5 authors
The integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and digital technologies has accelerated the transition to decentralized energy systems. Among these technologies, blockchain stands out for its ability to facilitate peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading efficiently and securely. This paper explores the concept of P2P energy trading within community microgrid systems, leveraging blockchain-based smart contracts. The proposed system integrates an incentive-driven demand response program directly into the smart contract framework, offering real-time rewards for load-balancing contributions. By incorporating the microgrid’s Energy Management System (EMS) and transparently recording all transactions on the blockchain, the proposed platform provides detailed data and immediate reward distribution. At the core of our system lies the Supply to Demand Ratio (SDR), ensuring fair energy exchange within the community. Dynamic pricing, enabled by blockchain and Tether (USDT) cryptocurrency, adjusts to real-time market conditions, enhancing transparency and responsiveness in energy trading. This adaptive pricing model fosters a more equitable and efficient trading environment compared to static approaches. Moreover, this system is tailored for community microgrids, emphasizing a community-centric approach. Local prosumers serve as validators in the blockchain network, aligning energy management decisions with community needs and dynamics. This localized engagement promotes efficiency and participation, fostering resilient, sustainable, and user-centric energy landscapes. Through rigorous analysis, we demonstrate the system’s effectiveness in optimizing economic efficiency, reducing operational costs, and increasing compliance rates. By combining blockchain technology with community-focused design principles, the proposed platform represents a significant advancement towards self-sufficiency and resilience in local energy systems.
N. B. Sai Shibu, Aryadevi Remanidevi Devidas, S. Balamurugan, Seshaiah Ponnekanti · 5 authors
Power outages can severely affect individuals, businesses, and communities, leading to disruptions, economic losses, and safety risks. The existing power recovery strategies often fail to adequately address the challenges associated with such outages. These challenges encompass a range of complexities, including resource allocation disparities, efficient prosumer integration, energy demand variability, and isolated generators. This paper presents a microgrid-centric power recovery strategy that leverages IoT, blockchain, smart contracts, and optimisation techniques for peer-to-peer energy sharing within the microgrid. The proposed strategy comprehensively addresses the challenges associated with the existing power recovery strategies. The paper outlines the system architecture for IoT and blockchain-enabled microgrids, discusses the mathematical modelling for energy sharing, and explores cost-optimal power restoration strategies. An incentive mechanism motivates prosumers to support restoration strategies during outages. Furthermore, the paper describes a blockchain smart contract facilitating peer-to-peer energy exchange in regions affected by power outages. This approach can mitigate the disruptive impact of power outages by providing reliable and community-centric power recovery solutions. Through validation with real-world data from our university’s distribution grid test bed, Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) analysis and performance evaluations using the Hyperledger Caliper benchmark tool, this paper demonstrates its feasibility and effectiveness, paving the way for enhanced power recovery strategies and increased resilience in the face of energy disruptions.
Nebojša Horvat, Dušan Gajić, Petar Trifunović, Veljko Petrović · 6 authors
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain-based energy trading solutions are often labeled as resource-hungry, excessive power consumers which consequently create a significant carbon footprint. Using this approach to energy trading, without simultaneously minimizing energy consumption, defeats the purpose of using such trading solutions to encourage renewable energy production and may even cancel out any ecological benefits. This paper demonstrates that it is possible to create a DLT-based energy trading system which provides security, transparency, autonomy, scalability, and decentralization, provided by using a DLT, but with significantly lower penalties than other previously known solutions. This is best illustrated through the fact that the carbon footprint per transaction of the solution presented in this paper is 0.19 grams of$CO_{2}$compared to 20 grams of$CO_{2}$created by single transaction of similar complexity on the Ethereum blockchain. This makes per-transaction carbon footprint of our system approximate 100 times smaller than that of the most commonly used Ethereum blockchain. We present the architecture and features of the proposed platform, as well as a thorough analysis of its performance, including power consumption and estimated carbon footprint. All experiments are done on a dedicated Beowulf cluster comprised of general-purpose computers. The cluster mimics a microgrid environment and presents a testing ground for real-world performance and power consumption analysis of a system used for trading energy predominantly produced from prosumers and their renewable sources.
A country's growth is gauged with reference to its power consumption and energy use, both of which are fast expanding. Energy consumption management improves energy generation and delivery. The smart grid is a tremendous improvement over the power system of the 20th century, using two-way electrical and communication exchanges to create a sophisticated, distributed, computerized energy delivery network. The fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and block chain distributed ledger technology (BDLT) are the most fascinating areas of study in the field of green energy and related power automation. An in-depth analysis of the most advanced automated planning, governance, optimization, confidentiality, and safety methods for the distribution of power and smart grid using integrated artificial intelligence and block chain is presented in this chapter.
In the 21st century, transitioning to renewable energy sources is imperative, with fossil fuel reserves depleting rapidly and recognizing critical environmental issues such as climate change, air pollution, water pollution, and habitat destruction. Embracing renewable energy is not only an environmental necessity but also a strategic move with multiple benefits. By shifting to renewable energy sources and supporting their production through the acquisition of renewable energy certificates, we foster innovation and drive economic growth in the renewable energy sector. This, in turn, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, aligning with global efforts to mitigate climate change. Additionally, renewable energy certificates ensure compliance with regulations that mandate the use of renewable energy, enhancing legal adherence while promoting transparency and trust in energy sourcing. To monitor the uptake of renewable energy, governments have implemented Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) as a tracking mechanism for the production and consumption of renewable energy. However, there are two main challenges to the existing REC schema: 1) The RECs have not been globally adopted due to inconsistent design; 2) The consumer privacy has not been well incorporated in the design of blockchain. In this study, we investigate the trading of RECs between suppliers and consumers using the directed acyclic graph (DAG) blockchain system and introduce a trading schema to help protect consumer information. Our results demonstrate lower transaction time by 41\% and energy consumption by 65\% compared to proof-of-stake.