Identity-Private P2P Energy Trading for Virtual Power Plants

The energy conservation, emission reduction, and electricity peak-load regulation requirements of smart cities have driven the establishment of virtual power plants (VPPs). Peer-to-peer (P2P) trading is applicable to distributed clean energy resources in VPPs and affects the transformation of the energy trading paradigm. To address the privacy protection and robustness issues of P2P trading, this paper presents a unified framework for point-to-point energy trading in VPPs. We comprehensively consider the multiple stages of verification and consensus in transactions and propose a complete framework. The proposed system can effectively protect participants’ private information and achieve identity authentication. Furthermore, we design a progressive settlement mechanism to ensure time-slot-level transaction parallelism. To verify the effectiveness of the method, we implemented the proposed system on IEEE bus benchmarks. The experiments covered the complete stages of authentication, consensus, and clearing. The overhead measurements showed that the overhead of the cryptographic components was reasonable and that the final signature adaptation introduced only a small computational overhead.