A Blockchain-Enabled Ecosystem for Distributed Electricity Trading in Smart City

TLDR: This article proposes a blockchain-based electricity trading (B-ET) ecosystem and designs a smart contract to ensure transactions are conducted in a safe and reliable manner and proposes a credit-based PoW consensus mechanism by integrating the concept of “stake” to improve the consortium blockchain under the B-ET ecosystem.

Abstract: Along with the development in the Internet of Things technology and smart city, a distributed network has been formed among cities. This makes it easy to integrate distributed electric energy into the power grid, thus become an efficient way to use energy. However, how to guarantee the security and privacy protection of distributed electricity trading has not been solved effectively. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based electricity trading (B-ET) ecosystem and design a smart contract to ensure transactions are conducted in a safe and reliable manner. To overcome the shortcomings of high latency in traditional Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus, we proposed a credit-based PoW consensus mechanism by integrating the concept of “stake” to improve the consortium blockchain under the B-ET ecosystem. Then, we take combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) system as an example that supplies distributed energy, and model its interactions with the agent of power grid by a novel Stackelberg game. We show that the optimal utilities of entities in a city can be obtained at the Stackelberg equilibrium by a distributed algorithm, which is guaranteed to exist and be unique. In the end, we conduct a number of numerical simulations to evaluate our proposed model and verify our algorithms, which demonstrate their correctness and efficiency completely.