Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Mechanism Based on Blockchain and Machine Learning for Sustainable Electrical Power Supply in Smart Grid

TLDR: In this paper, a blockchain-based predictive energy trading platform is proposed to provide real-time support, day-ahead controlling, and generation scheduling of distributed energy resources in smart microgrids.

Abstract: It is expected that peer to peer energy trading will constitute a significant share of research in upcoming generation power systems due to the rising demand of energy in smart microgrids. However, the on-demand use of energy is considered a big challenge to achieve the optimal cost for households. This paper proposes a blockchain-based predictive energy trading platform to provide real-time support, day-ahead controlling, and generation scheduling of distributed energy resources. The proposed blockchain-based platform consists of two modules; blockchain-based energy trading and smart contract enabled predictive analytics modules. The blockchain module allows peers with real-time energy consumption monitoring, easy energy trading control, reward model, and unchangeable energy trading transaction logs. The smart contract enabled predictive analytics module aims to build a prediction model based on historical energy consumption data to predict short-term energy consumption. This paper uses real energy consumption data acquired from the Jeju province energy department, the Republic of Korea. This study aims to achieve optimal power flow and energy crowdsourcing, supporting energy trading among the consumer and prosumer. Energy trading is based on day-ahead, real-time control, and scheduling of distributed energy resources to meet the smart grid’s load demand. Moreover, we use data mining techniques to perform time-series analysis to extract and analyze underlying patterns from the historical energy consumption data. The time-series analysis supports energy management to devise better future decisions to plan and manage energy resources effectively. To evaluate the proposed predictive model’s performance, we have used several statistical measures, such as mean square error and root mean square error on various machine learning models, namely recurrent neural networks and alike. Moreover, we also evaluate the blockchain platform’s effectiveness through hyperledger calliper in terms of latency, throughput, and resource utilization. Based on the experimental results, the proposed model is effectively used for energy crowdsourcing between the prosumer and consumer to attain service quality.