VPT: Privacy Preserving Energy Trading and Block Mining Mechanism for Blockchain Based Virtual Power Plants

The desire to overcome reliability issues of the distributed energy resources (DERs) led researchers to develop a novel concept named virtual power plant (VPP). VPPs are supposed to carry out intelligent and secure energy trading among prosumers, buyers, and generating stations along with providing efficient energy management. Therefore, integrating blockchain within a decentralized VPP network emerged as a novel paradigm. However, this decentralization also suffers with trust, reliability, energy management, and efficiency issues due to DERs dynamic nature. Thus, in this article, we first work to provide an efficient energy management strategy for VPPs to enhance demand response, then we propose an energy oriented trading and block mining protocol and name it as P roof o f E nergy M arket (PoEM). To enhance it further, we integrate differential privacy in PoEM and propose a P rivate PoEM (PPoEM) model. Collectively, we propose a private decentralized VPP trading model and named it as V irtual P rivate T rading (VPT). We further carry out extensive theoretical analysis and derive step-by-step valuations for market race probability, market stability probability, energy trading expectation, winning state probability, and prospective leading-time profit values. Afterwards, we carry out simulation-based experiments of our proposed model to show the effectiveness and novelty as compared to state-of-the-art works.