Decentralized energy trading in microgrids offers significant efficiency benefits but must simultaneously satisfy conflicting requirements for efficiency, safety, and privacy. This work is innovative because it demonstrates how blockchain and cryptographic techniques can be combined to achieve all three properties without requiring a centralized authority. The approach enables local energy trading while preventing exploitation of trading activity.
This paper introduces TRANSAX, a blockchain-based decentralized energy trading platform for transactive microgrids that simultaneously addresses efficiency, safety, and privacy requirements. The system uses smart contracts for transparent trading while employing cryptographic mixing protocols for anonymization. The architecture leverages distributed ledgers and resilient information architecture to enable peer-to-peer energy trading.
The TRANSAX platform was evaluated through testbed experiments and demonstrated feasibility of private blockchain-based energy trading. The system successfully maintained energy safety constraints while preserving privacy of trading activities. The hybrid solver architecture proved effective for solving complex energy allocation problems while distributing computation across resilient ledger nodes.
@article{eisele2020Safe,
author = {Eisele, Scott and Eghtesad, Taha and Campanelli, Keegan and Agrawal, Prakhar and Laszka, Aron and Dubey, Abhishek},
journal = {ACM Trans. Cyber-Phys. Syst.},
title = {Safe and Private Forward-Trading Platform for Transactive Microgrids},
year = {2021},
issn = {2378-962X},
month = {jan},
number = {1},
volume = {5},
abstract = {Transactive microgrids have emerged as a transformative solution for the problems faced by distribution system operators due to an increase in the use of distributed energy resources and rapid growth in renewable energy generation. Transactive microgrids are tightly coupled cyber and physical systems, which require resilient and robust financial markets where transactions can be submitted and cleared, while ensuring that erroneous or malicious transactions cannot destabilize the grid. In this paper, we introduce TRANSAX, a novel decentralized platform for transactive microgrids. TRANSAX enables participants to trade in an energy futures market, which improves efficiency by finding feasible matches for energy trades, reducing the load on the distribution system operator. TRANSAX provides privacy to participants by anonymizing their trading activity using a distributed mixing service, while also enforcing constraints that limit trading activity based on safety requirements, such as keeping power flow below line capacity. We show that TRANSAX can satisfy the seemingly conflicting requirements of efficiency, safety, and privacy, and we demonstrate its performance using simulation results.},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
articleno = {8},
contribution = {lead},
doi = {10.1145/3403711},
issue_date = {January 2021},
keywords = {blockchain, distributed energy, transactive energy, privacy, smart contracts, microgrids},
numpages = {29},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
tag = {decentralization, power},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3403711},
month_numeric = {1}
}