A Blockchain Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading System for Microgrids

Traditional power grids have been the major source of electricity for several households and industries for a number of years. However, with that kind of supply, every member of the grid is affected whenever there is a fault on the transmission line connecting them. With that in mind, microgrids, usually powered by numerous distributed electrical sources, were introduced to curb this problem, and as such, energy users have also become producers themselves. Nonetheless, the generation of power by distributed sources brings about unpredictability on the network and, in essence, problems in energy sharing. Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has several advantages and has been introduced to mitigate energy sharing problems. With networked energy trading comes the issue of trust, as several prosumers are concerned about their privacy and security in such environments. Therefore, this work leverages the advantages of blockchain in proposing a secure energy trading platform for all parties involved. Coupled with certificateless signcryption, an immutable energy trading market is designed, and its use case is applicable in smart cities. A thorough security analysis was performed, and the efficiency of our proposed solution is backed by numerical results.