Dissertations and Theses
Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Department
Engineering
First Advisor
Tarek Saadawi
Keywords
Blockchain Energy Trading Peer-to-Peer Smart Contract Decentralization
Abstract
The emergence of prosumers provides an opportunity for the setup of a local energy market (LEM) where individual households with distributed energy resources (DERs) can produce, store, and trade energy. Peer-to-peer(P2P) and decentralized energy trading (ET) can be implemented between the participants within or across microgrids. Several solutions based on the existing technologies have been proposed worldwide for the integration of prosumers in the existing energy setup and to enable and support ET, but these solutions present the issues of centralization, data integrity, and confidentiality, user and anonymity, and transparency. The applications of blockchain technology have recently become fascinating for researchers because of its inherent benefits, such as immutability, enhanced security and traceability which offer solutions to some fundamental problems in smart grids and in the energy sector.
In this dissertation, we investigated into the applications of blockchain technology in the energy sector and proposing and implementation of a blockchain-enabled framework to enable the efficient utilization and trading of energy generated from renewable energy sources. The focus of our proposed model is to enable consumers and prosumers in a small community, to securely trade electricity with each other in a P2P fashion using blockchain technology without the intervention of a central trusted party. We implemented an Ethereum smart contracts-based framework to empower parties to transmit a request for buying energy and float offers for selling energy anonymously throughout the auction process till the agreement is achieved. Moreover, using SC, the auction process is done by implementing multiple filters at different stages to ensure the buyer’s energy requirements are met, and the best match is established, and the seller’s profitability is maintained, addressing the issue of price imbalance in the local energy market. We performed the performance, security and privacy analysis of our framework and compared it with the existing solutions to validate that our framework provides data integrity, data confidentiality, privacy, identity management, blind auction and ensures member’s profitability. The implementation of our blockchain based P2P secure energy trading platform in microgrids would open a gateway for the end consumers to enter and decide the electricity prices in the local energy markets who otherwise had no option and say but to buy energy from a utility company at a pre-fixed market price. Also, the involvement of the local user in the management of the microgrids would bring a sense of trust and ownership into the local communities and thereby would have a huge socio-economic impact.
Recommended Citation
Sachdeva, Saurabh, "Blockchain based Framework for Secure and Decentralized Energy Trading - Transforming Local Energy Markets for Sustainable Communities" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/1289
