Design of a privacy-preserving decentralized energy trading scheme in blockchain network environment

Abstract Small and medium-sized users with distributed generators or flexible demand response resources desire to participate in market transactions solely, rather than aggregated by aggregators. The commonly used decentralized bookkeeping mode, blockchain-based trading schemes can now realize uniform clearing of decentralized transactions with the help of smart contracts. However, there are still risks of excessive disclosure of information and privacy leakage caused by incomplete decentralization. To solve this problem, we propose a decentralized optimization-based market clearing model, which can be applied on blockchain. The model has three advantages: ① limited access to the consumers’ or generators’ private data, ② convenient calculation methods that can be deployed on the smart contract and ③ pure decentralization to realize transparent on-chain market clearing. Moreover, considering the insufficient throughput of the existing blockchain, a blockchain network, which can process the quotation calculation in parallel with various sub-chains, is also designed to support the proposed market clearing model. Finally, the effectiveness of proposed models is validated and tested on the Ethereum private blockchain.