Blockchain Framework for Negawatt Energy Trading With Incentives and Limits: P2PnW-Chain

The growing adoption of smart grid technologies and energy market deregulation has simplified decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. However, the concept of negawatt trading remains underexplored and relatively unclear. This paper presents P2PnW-Chain, a private, permissioned blockchain-based decentralized negawatt trading framework that addresses critical solutions for low-voltage and grid stability issues in traditional systems. It is built on Ethereum 2.0-compatible Hyperledger Besu, Teku, integrated with Smart Contracts, and utilizes Quorum Byzantine Fault Tolerance (QBFT) consensus mechanism. This system automates negawatt trading, curtailment verification, incentive validation, and transparently grants incentives or penalties to the incentive-consumeers/prosumers based on their energy curtailment during peak hours. It allows dual-role participation for both consumers and prosumers, enhancing system flexibility. It supports on-chain and off-chain permissioning to ensure anonymity, efficiency, and confidentiality. The simulated results of the P2PnW-Chain system moderated low voltage incidents by 15-25%, and reduced low voltage deviations by 10-18%. During peak hours, energy savings improved by 12%, and prosumer participation rate increased up to 70%. Extensive performance evaluations demonstrate that the P2PnW-Chain network maintains a stable CPU load of 76%, with memory consumption between 101–175 MB for 100 nodes, exhibiting low latency and high throughput. Notably, QBFT outperforms IBFT and Ethash by achieving <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.5{\times }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3{\times }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> higher throughput, respectively, while reducing latency by up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5{\times }$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. These findings validate P2PnW-Chain’s scalability and resilience for decentralized negawatt trading in the modern smart grid ecosystems.