BARET: Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence Enabled Renewable Energy Trading Framework

Renewable Energy (RE) plays an important role in minimizing the exploitation of natural resources. Also, it helps to reduce the emission of harmful gases in our surroundings. The Blockchain-based Renewable Energy Trading (RET) platform is a futuristic, sustainable solution that allows us to trade RE with less involvement of intermediaries. However, an increase in transaction volume on these platforms leads to delays in transaction confirmation time. Thus, the interest of producers and consumers loses pace. Therefore, we need an alternative solution that can handle the transaction burden without being affected by the increase in producers and consumers participating in the Blockchain-enabled RET platform. In this context, this paper proposed a Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence Enabled Transactive Renewable Energy Trading Framework called BARET. The BARET framework uses the Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine. The Blockchain uses smart contracts to provide trust and transparency in the BARET framework. Also, integrating the Priority-based Double Action using the K-Means clustering (PDA-KC) mechanism to prioritize the number of transactions that are used to store on-chain appropriately. The results demonstrate the suitability of the proposed BARET framework in real-time through a use case. Additionally, a case study using smart contracts and PDA-KC-based results is presented to show the working of the proposed framework. Finally, a tablebased comparison indicates the advantages of the BARET framework over state-of-the-art works.