EFFICIENT AND TRANSPARENT PEER TO PEER RENEWABLE ENERGY TRADING IN GENOA LOCAL COMMUNITY USING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

The thesis simulates how P2P renewable energy trading within the Genoa community achieves transparency, efficiency, and trust using blockchain technology. The mimic of the “Centralised trading” and “P2P trading” scenarios for the simulation model was created using Python and Streamlit. The P2P energy trading platform allows prosumers to use their self-generated energy first, and to trade any surplus renewable energy to the consumers within the community. All P2P transactions were recorded in an immutable fashion that involves hashing, distribution, and consensus mechanism of all the participating nodes. These key characteristics of the blockchain architecture provide transparency, efficiency, and ensure integrity within the community. The simulation for centralised trading scenarios uses traditional energy trading method where there is no local energy generation and the energy flows from the Utility to the consumers without the blockchain. Whereas in the case of the P2P trading scenario, the simulation incorporates the stochastic energy generation from the prosumers, enable trading using automated matching of the buyer and seller based on bid-price logic. The priority for trading is given to the local trade over Utility purchases. The dashboard provides performance metrics that includes Local trade ratio (%), Average cost per kWh, Self-sufficiency (%), Total saving (in Euros), Total system cost (in Euros). The result shows the improvement in the local energy utilization using P2P renewable energy trading system. Also, it shows economic benefits to the community participants and reduces the dependency on the Utility purchases. The P2P trading ledger shows the integrity as the ledger transactions are hashed, verified and consensus has been reached. In summary, the study highlights P2P energy trading using blockchain technology enables fairer pricing, distributed energy trading, more efficient use of renewable energy, and improves transparency within the local community.