Security-aware Transactive Energy System with Virtual Power Plants Through Blockchain and Multi-Signature

Transactive energy, characterized by decentralized energy trading among distributed energy resources, is gaining prominence as a solution to meet the evolving needs of modern energy markets. Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) play a pivotal role in this landscape, serving as aggregators of diverse energy resources to coordinate and optimize energy generation, consumption, and trading. As the energy market becomes more open and decentralized, blockchain offers inherent advantages such as transparency, immutability, and security, making it an ideal platform to facilitate transactive energy market. Therefore, in this work, we leverage a permissioned blockchain platform Fabric to enable efficient and secure energy trading. Considering that VPPs are virtual and do not have account control permissions, a multi-signature wallet is tailored for VPPs, enhancing the security and reliability of energy transactions. First, we introduce a non-interactive BLS-based multi-signature wallet for VPPs, eliminating communication rounds in Schnorr schemes and enabling group consensus without centralized control. Then, a three-layer architecture (transaction-energy-blockchain) is designed to decouple market bidding, physical energy flows, and atomic fund settlements. Finally, a five-stage secured transaction protocol (initialization, double auction, contract deployment, energy transmission, fund transfer) ensures atomicity and fairness. Experiments on an open-source simulation platform, PEMT-CoSim, verify the effectiveness of the proposed system. This work contributes to the advancement of energy transactions among VPPs, offering insights into secure and efficient energy trading and resource management in decentralized energy markets.