Blockchain Technology Based Decentralized Energy Trading for Multiple-Microgrid Systems

With the emerging technology for distributed generation and urge of improving quality of service of power supply for energy users, more and more Microgrids (MGs) are integrated into the distributed networks to serve the energy users. These Microgrids are gradually formulating a Multi-Microgrid System (MMGS, Multi-Microgrid System), which will play an important role for the future energy supply. Building a centralized control center not only increases the expense of investment, but also brings the issues of maintaining fairness among energy users. To address these problems, this paper proposes a peer-to-peer method for energy trading of MMGS, based on the idea of decentralized trading. An auction-based trading mechanism suitable for peer-to-peer energy trading is proposed first. For this mechanism, the MGs firstly declare their energy buying bids or selling quotations. Then, the market-clearing price is determined by using a unified weight clearing algorithm in a decentralized manner. By applying the edge technology of Blockchain, the implementation of the proposed peer-to-peer energy trading method, including the architecture, procedures, security check, etc., is also discussed. The proposed Blockchain-based energy trading platform can realize the decentralized and autonomous energy trading of MGs within an MMGS. A case study with an MMGS with 10 MG units is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.