Implementation Framework of a Blockchain Based Infrastructure for Electricity Trading within a Microgrid

Abstract

Smart grid appears as a progression of a traditional electrical grid that ensures sustainable and economically efficient electricity system with enhanced quality, security and safety. The opportunity to produce electricity from renewable energy resources resulted with appearance of new type of participants within the smart grid. In order to provide fair trading environment for these participants significant research activities have been made in order to support the shift from centralized to distributed trading systems. The blockchain technology is recognized as a suitable backbone due to its inherent characteristics of decentralization and distributedness. This paper proposes a novel blockchain-based platform for electricity trading and provides implementation details of its constituting elements. The proposed infrastructure relies on the blockchain with enhanced, energy efficient consensus protocol, and assumes that prosumers of a micro-grid may also act as miners within a mining pool that validates trading transactions. Architecture of the system, employed smart contracts and monitoring of the system operations are described. The paper also points out to an alternative option for the pool mining that provides heavy reduction of the energy consumption in comparison with a traditional Proof-of-Work approach. Finally, a framework for an optimization of the pool manager and pool miners working strategies is given.