Enabling Energy Trading in Cooperative Microgrids: A Scalable Blockchain-Based Approach With Redundant Data Exchange

Blockchain has recently been regarded as an important enabler for building secure energy trading in microgrid systems because of its inherent features of distributively providing immutable data record, storage, and sharing across networks in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner. However, designing highly efficient and scalable blockchain-enabled energy trading mechanisms is extremely challenging because of the unique features of microgrid systems, e.g., bandwidth-constrained and high-latency communications and large-scale renewable energy source (RES) integration. To address this challenge, in this article, we propose a novel scalable blockchain-based energy trading framework for cooperative microgrid systems, which include four planes, i.e., data plane, consensus plane, smart plane, and application plane. Different from the existing solutions without consideration of network transmission, these four planes are designed with the capability of perceiving the status of block generation and transmission over interrupted P2P networks, and thus proactively improving the consensus process to guarantee the reliability of energy trading in cooperative microgrids. Meanwhile, built on this framework, a novel redundant data exchange strategy is proposed to improve the scalability of block creation with the presence of large-scale RES penetration and interrupted and dynamic communication links. Simulation results show that the proposed system framework outperforms the benchmark blockchain solutions. Furthermore, we investigate the potential applications of the proposed solutions in the practical microgrid systems to facilitate a clear understanding of the mechanisms of the proposed solutions.