Blockchain-Enabled Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading (BE- PET) with Distributed Authority

Smart power grid is rapidly transforming the conventional distribution system by incorporating the state of art metering infrastructures, smart distribution boards and integration of myriad energy resources into the central grid. Though conventional energy distribution has transformed significantly yet decentralization of resources is an open area of research. Various models have been proposed for its decentralization however security and privacy challenges constrain their implementation. In the context of decentralization, concept of presumer has gained significant importance as they are the one who can act both as a consumer and producer of electricity for further distribution to grid or its neighbors. Peer-to-peer energy trading has recently attracted much of the attention and is being considered a possible solution towards practical realization of prosumer based energy trading among nodes. With the advent of block chain technology and its integration into smart grid, a secure distributed energy trading mechanism among prosumers and consumers can be realized through distributed consensus and tamper proof log of data. This paper presents, after a thorough review of existing solutions, a block chain based architecture along with flow of algorithm which can be employed for safe and secure trading of energy among presumers and consumers. In this paper, Smart contract and Byzantine General problem based consensus has been proposed for secure trading among nodes in distributed network (DN). An e-Token based incentive mechanism has been proposed for encouraging nodes to participate in energy transfer and block verification. Reliability index as proposed in [1] has been dovetailed into the overall proposed algorithm to ensure trusted energy transfer sessions among peers in DN. Implementation of proposed scheme will enable network users (prosumers and consumers) to seamlessly participate in secure energy trading.