ETradeChain: Blockchain-Based Energy Trading in Local Energy Market (LEM) Using Modified Double Auction Protocol

The smart grid’s local energy market (LEM) enables each renewable-energy-powered residential unit to profit from trading energy with others. However, energy trading in LEMs is witnessing many cybersecurity challenges, such as transaction integrity and user authentication. Among these, energy trading and price computing using auctions have generally been accepted. However, state-of-the-art auction schemes are centralized and unfair, meaning that prosumers are not equally benefited. We proposed ETradeChain, a platform for energy trading based on blockchain technology. The trading in ETradeChain happens with the help of a modified double auction scheme to make it fully decentralized and fair for all the members of LEM, along with information secrecy. We have developed a pseudo coin called Pcoins (Power Coins) based on the energy generated by the prosumer for energy trading in LEM. The ETradeChain uses a double auction process with Pcoin as a stake to reach a consensus on the energy transaction. Furthermore, ETradeChain employs blockchain technology to demonstrate the viability of real-time peer-to-peer (P2P) trading for practical purposes. We have set up a Testbed for the experiments using Raspberry Pi 4 model B IoT devices. The experiment results show that the ETradeChain minimized the consensus delay up to 90% with 60% high throughput. It also achieved 80% low computational overhead and 70-80% low storage and communication overhead.