SMART CONTRACT FOR P2P ENERGY TRADING IN SMART GRIDS: ETHEREUM IMPLEMENTATION AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Abstract

The energy trading industry has recently witnessed great progress driven by the high advancements in renewable energy production and storage. As energy plays a major role in our daily lives, there is a need to develop technologies to facilitate energy trading between sellers and buyers based on the available resources and users' requirements. In the past decade, blockchain technology has gained attention due to its advantages of being decentralized and distributed, hence facilitates the direct communication between different entities in a network. Smart Contract is the primary concept that enables blockchain to run scripts to serve diverse applications. One of the most popular blockchain platforms is Ethereum where smart contracts can be deployed for multiple applications, one of which is energy trading. Energy trading through blockchain allows sellers and buyers to communicate together via transactions and transfer energy based on the smart contract criteria/conditions. In this thesis, private blockchain network is implemented using Docker containers. Each container represents an authorized node in the blockchain network. The consensus algorithm considered in this work is Proof-of- Authority (PoA). This algorithm allows participants to take turns in generating new blocks in a rotational mechanism. Furthermore, the performance metric of the network is measured in terms of throughput. Due to the high throughput while increasing the network size, makes the system efficient and scalable. Such types of implementation using smart grids provide a solid framework to test blockchain performance in real-life markets, offering both a secure and simple way of energy trading mechanisms.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Science and Engineering