Secure Energy Transactions Using Blockchain – Leveraging AI for Fraud Detection and Energy Market Stability

Peer-to-peer trading and the move to decentralized grids have reshaped the energy markets in the United States. Notwithstanding, such developments lead to new challenges, mainly regarding the safety and authenticity of energy trade. This study aimed to develop and build a secure, intelligent, and efficient energy transaction system for the decentralized US energy market. This research interlinks the technological prowess of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) in a novel way to solve long-standing challenges in the distributed energy market, specifically those of security, fraudulent behavior detection, and market reliability. The dataset for this research is comprised of more than 1.2 million anonymized energy transaction records from a simulated peer-to-peer (P2P) energy exchange network emulating real-life blockchain-based American microgrids, including those tested by LO3 Energy and Grid+ Labs. Each record contains detailed fields of transaction identifier, timestamp, energy volume (kWh), transaction type (buy/sell), unit price, prosumer/consumer identifier (hashed for privacy), smart meter readings, geolocation regions, and settlement confirmation status. The dataset also includes system-calculated behavior metrics of transaction rate, variability of energy production, and historical pricing patterns. The system architecture proposed involves the integration of two layers, namely a blockchain layer and artificial intelligence (AI) layer, each playing a unique but complementary function in energy transaction securing and market intelligence improvement. The machine learning models used in this research were specifically chosen for their established high performance in classification tasks, specifically in the identification of energy transaction fraud in decentralized markets. To guarantee the reliability and accuracy of the used machine learning models, an extensive battery of evaluation metrics was utilized. The plot demonstrates clearly that XG-Boost obtained the highest accuracy out of the three models, Random Forest was slightly lower, and conversely, Logistic Regression was the lowest of the three models. Integrating blockchain technology with AI can increase the transparency, security, and efficiency of the energy sector in the U.S. Blockchain's decentralized and immutable ledger can make energy transactions traceable and resistant to tampering, and it becomes extremely hard for malicious actors to manipulate prices or fake records. In the future, the integration of deep learning methodologies and real-time integration of data from the Internet of Things (IoT) holds promising implications for future improvements. Deep learning models like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) can detect strongly nonlinear patterns of fraud, which conventional models may not identify, particularly for the usage of multivariate time-series data from smart meters, sensors, and distributed energy resources.