A Proof-of-Stake public blockchain based pricing scheme for peer-to-peer energy trading

Abstract Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading allows prosumers to trade energy directly without intermediaries. To provide a payment system and record transaction information, public blockchain is designed to match the decentralized feature of the P2P market. The incentive for nodes outside the microgrid is removed but it is maintained for the prosumers within the microgrid. Therefore the number of miner competitors is limited to decrease the mining difficulty and its power consumption. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol defines the function of blockchain with its mining mechanism. Miners sacrifice part of their stake to compensate for the power losses and reduce the price gap from the traditional prosumer-to-grid trading (Feed-in-tariff). Moreover, the proposed model also contributes to increase the social welfare by improving producers’ income and consumers’ cost-saving through the designed pricing scheme, which eliminates the price gap between buying and selling. Successful mining is encouraged by rewards accordingly. A case study is introduced where a microgrid model with 27 prosumers is tested with the PoS public blockchain-based pricing scheme. The process of model implementation and smart contract creation are specifically demonstrated. Numerical results prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.