Blockchain Based Solar Energy Trading

Abstract

Depletion of non-renewable energy resources is having an adverse effect on the planet. Therefore, various governments have begun enforcing use of renewable energy to meet the rising electricity demands. Due to environmental and resiliency benefits, distributed energy resources are a potential solution for meeting future electricity demand. Combining the flow of the energy along with networks forms the Energy Internet. The survey provides a concise review of smart grid, blockchain architecture and their role in distributed energy trading. Solar energy has been the primary focus as the renewable energy resource for implementation purposes. Smart grid ensures an efficient distribution of the power, hold low losses, maintain degree of quality, and the safety of power supply. Such a setup has nodes including power sources and arrangements for transferring power to other nodes as well. It has various parameters that are of primary concern like power supply control, power flow execution, limiting the electricity as per the top layer transactions with help of monitoring devices, etc. Microcontrollers are responsible for interacting with the network and accessing data on it. Blockchain technology has been largely confined to finance and cryptocurrency. Recently, the technology has emerged as a distributed ledger technology which allows exchanges among participants without the need for a central market entity. The blockchain gives immutability of the transactions, which make sure each transaction among peers will be executed. It additionally gives immutability to transaction history, which may be used for audit or fixing a transaction dispute. Transaction executions are performed using smart contracts. Synchronization of the logical and physical layer between a pair of nodes forms the crux of the survey.