IEEE Access (Jan 2020)

A Blockchain-Enhanced Transaction Model for Microgrid Energy Trading

  • Martin Onyeka Okoye,
  • Junyou Yang,
  • Jia Cui,
  • Zhenjiang Lei,
  • Jingwei Yuan,
  • Haixin Wang,
  • Huichao Ji,
  • Jiawei Feng,
  • Chinenye Ezeh

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3012389
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8
pp. 143777 – 143786

Abstract

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In the power sector, microgrids play a supportive role in bridging the adequacy gap in the conventional electricity supply. Trading of the generated energy has recently been improved by blockchain technology which offers a new cheap, secure, and decentralized transaction approach. Its operation is however associated with an undesired inherent delay during energy transactions initiated by the prosumers, thus, failure to timely attend to incidences of urgent demand could end up in catastrophe at the consumer's side. This article thus proposes a cyber-enhanced transactive microgrid model using blockchain technology with optimized participants' permission protocol to ameliorate this challenge. It is demonstrated that the optimized blockchain participants' permission model leads to improved transaction speed and greater convenience. The transaction speed simulation is thereafter performed and it was also demonstrated that the node population has a greater effect than the transaction block size on the transaction speed improvement.

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