Blockchain-based renewable energy trading system with smart contract in a small local community

Riseul Ryu, Soonja Yeom

Abstract: With the high interest in the peer to peer (P2P) energy trading system, blockchain technology has increased attention as a solution to alleviate the current challenges in the centralised energy system. The study set out to discover how blockchain could be used for microgrid while controlling the scalability to encourage peer-to-peer energy trading with the assumption of the average dwelling density at around 20-30 households. The results showed that there is a scalability challenge in the blockchain as the network grows; however, the blockchain technology can be applied in the community which has a similar size with Hobart as there is no significant difference in the execution time up to 100 nodes while accumulating the transactions. Additionally, the study also found mining time, transaction fee and transactions number in the block are also related to the execution time. Therefore, these parameters should be considered to build a scalable blockchain for a microgrid.