On the applicability of distributed ledger architectures to peer-to-peer energy trading framework

TL;DR

This paper evaluates distributed ledger architectures like Blockchain, Block Lattice, and Tangle for enabling decentralized peer-to-peer energy trading, highlighting their benefits and challenges in modern energy systems.

Contribution

It compares different distributed ledger approaches for P2P energy trading, proposing their applicability and analyzing technical advantages and challenges.

Findings

Distributed ledger architectures facilitate decentralized energy trading.

Blockchain, Block Lattice, and Tangle each have unique advantages and challenges.

These architectures support flexible, secure, and environmentally beneficial energy transactions.

Abstract

As more and more distributed renewable energy resources are integrated to the grid, the traditional consumers have become the prosumers who can sell back their surplus energy to the others who are in energy shortage. This peer-to-peer (P2P) energy transaction framework benefits the end users, financially and in term of energy security; and the network operators, in term of flexibility in DRES management, peak load shifting and regulation of voltage/frequency. Environmentally, P2P energy transaction also helps to reduce carbon footprint, reduces DRES payback period and incentivizes the installation of DRES. The current centralized market model is no longer suitable and it is therefore necessary to develop an adapted decentralized architecture for the advanced P2P energy transaction framework intra/inter-microgrid. In this paper, we discuss several distributed ledger approaches for such framework: Blockchain, Block Lattice and Directed Acyclic Graph (the Tangle). The technical advantages of these architectures as well as the persistent challenges are then considered.