Abstract
Growing intelligent cities is witnessing an increasing amount of local energy generation through renewable energy resources. Energy trade among the local energy generators (aka prosumers) and consumers can reduce the energy consumption cost and also reduce the dependency on conventional energy resources, not to mention the environmental, economic, and societal benefits. However, these local energy sources might not be enough to fulfill energy consumption demands. A hybrid approach, where consumers can buy energy from both prosumers (that generate energy) and also from prosumer of other locations, is essential. A centralized system can be used to manage this energy trading that faces several security issues and increase centralized development cost. In this paper, a hybrid energy trading system coupled with a smart contract named SynergyGrids has been proposed as a solution, that reduces the average cost of energy and load over the utility grids. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to create a hybrid energy trading platform over the smart contract for energy demand prediction. An hourly energy data set has been utilized for testing and validation purposes. The trading system shows 17.8% decrease in energy cost for consumers and 76.4% decrease in load over utility grids when compared with its counterparts.
Highlights
Electricity has become an essential underpinning constituent in the developing world
This paper investigates the use of blockchain technology with energy trading by proposing a blockchain-supported distributed m microgrid energy trading model
Once all the energy transactions between peers and microgrids are done, this contract can be used by the buyers to buy the energy, and it is directly accessible by the system participants and is deployed only by the utility grid
Summary
Electricity has become an essential underpinning constituent in the developing world. Blockchain, as a technology, has emerged as a secure and efficient alternative as it provides path towards implementing trustful and decentralized energy trading markets [1, 2]. Due to this nature, it has been successful in attracting attention from various researchers and has become a new important part of energy trading systems. Motivated by the existing work and use of blockchain in energy markets, an autonomous blockchain assisted P2P and M2M energy trading system named SynergyGrids is developed to improve the social utility and overall benefits of prosumers and consumers in the microgrids.
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