ElectroBlocks: A blockchain-based energy trading scheme for smart grid systems

Smart grid systems are widely used across the world for providing demand response management between users and service providers. In most of the energy distributions scenarios, the traditional grid systems use the centralized architecture, which results in large transmission losses and high overheads during power generation. Moreover, owing to the presence of intruders or attackers, there may be a mismatch between demand and supply between utility centers (suppliers) and end users. Thus, there is a need for an automated energy exchange to provide secure and reliable energy trading between users and suppliers. We found, from the existing literature, that blockchain can be an effective solution to handle the aforementioned issues. Motivated by these facts, we propose a blockchain-based smart energy trading scheme,ElectroBlocks, which provides efficient mechanisms for secure energy exchanges between users and service providers. InElectroBlocks, nodes in the network validate the transaction using two algorithms that are cost aware and store aware. The cost-aware algorithm locates the nearest node that can supply the energy, whereas the store-aware algorithm ensures that the energy requests go to the node with the lowest storage space. We evaluated the performance of theElectroBlocksusing performance metrics such as mining delay, network exchanges, and storage energy. The simulation results obtained demonstrate thatElectroBlocksmaintains a secure trade-off between users and service providers when using the proposed cost-aware and store-aware algorithms.