Scalable and Transparent Blockchain Multi-layer Approach for Smart Energy Communities

Abstract

The Blockchain paradigm applied to energy communities represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Indeed, it introduces a new distributed and transparent framework to manage the communities’ services. In the meantime, it guarantees the traceability of the energy produced and consumed, informing consumers of the origins and costs of their supply, making tariffs more transparent with the result of promoting energy flexibility. Blockchain enables a real digitalization of the energy sector, maintaining a high level of trust and compliance. The security of the transaction and the guarantee that the platform on which an energy network is based cannot be tampered with has prompted energy communities to start a blockchain-based system. The paper proposed a blockchain-based open and transparent ecosystem for smart energy communities within different and several actors interfacing thanks to the blockchain system and its services interact in a natural and disintermediate way. It allows, in a peer-to-peer (p2p) manner, to implement participatory logic aimed at reducing and self-consumption of energy and direct participation of citizens in the electricity system. A proof of concept is created and tested using an innovative smart legal contract framework created by Trakti and a scalable blockchain ecosystem thanks to the Trakti platform through an end-to-end approach. Indeed, this platform implements a new way of automatically managing and incentivizing the energy community via a smart contract connecting actual data and services that the smart energy community can consume using community energy tokens. The approach demonstrates how the new smart legal contract makes it possible to define an energy token, which remunerates the energy exchanges in communities between producers and consumers within a smart grid and converts the energy into community services.