Blockchain-Enabled P2P Decentralized Smart Energy Trading Platform

Overview

The project addresses the centralised, intermediary-heavy nature of conventional residential energy distribution. In a community with growing rooftop-solar penetration, individual households naturally become prosumers — producing surplus energy at some intervals and consuming it at others. Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading lets prosumers and consumers exchange energy directly, without a central utility broker acting as the trusted counterparty for every transaction.

The engineered platform combines three layers: (i) a per-household embedded node that physically measures energy import and export via a bi-directional smart meter, (ii) a permissioned consortium blockchain running on the same nodes to record trading data immutably, and (iii) an off-chain double-auction matching algorithm that pairs buyers and sellers in each trading round.

The demonstrated system is a 10-node Raspberry Pi cluster in which each Pi acts as a full blockchain node and as the embedded controller for its associated smart meter — a deliberately low-cost mapping of a residential household onto a single-board computer.

System Architecture

Hardware

Key Engineering Work

• Running a full Quorum blockchain client on Raspberry Pi 4 — non-trivial given the ARM build target and the resource profile of a full Ethereum-family node
• Bootstrapping an IBFT-based consortium network from scratch: node key generation, genesis configuration, static-node peering, and account allocation across the cluster
• Deployment automation — replacing an entirely manual, command-line bring-up with Python and shell scripts that install toolchains, initialise nodes, clear state, and start the network reproducibly
• Smart-contract engineering in Solidity around a round + phase timing model keyed to block number, including deterministic serialisation for hash stability
• On-chain / off-chain co-design: keeping the double-auction algorithm off-chain and using hash-only submission with ⅔ agreement to bound gas cost
• Smart-meter integration: polling the WEM3080 over Wi-Fi from a Python client, extracting bidirectional kWh data and feeding it into the on-chain state
• Hardware iteration: revising the node from a PZEM-004T + Modbus wired design to a WEM3080 + Wi-Fi design, reducing physical wiring and SBC I/O load
• Contract deployment via web3.py, including AES-128-based key material handling during automated deploys

Results & Validation

Ten-node Quorum consortium reached and maintained IBFT consensus across Raspberry Pi 4 hardware, with each node acting simultaneously as a full validator and as the embedded controller for its household smart meter.

Fully scripted network bring-up: tool installation, node initialisation, state clean-up, and smart-contract deployment run reproducibly from a single command.

Phase-1 data submission works end-to-end on-chain, including the serialised, order-preserving hash-chaining that makes the round history tamper-evident.

Phase-2 double-auction matching executes off-chain across the cluster and only its result hash is committed on-chain; ⅔ hash agreement is used to accept a round result.

Smart-meter integration reads and reports bidirectional energy import / export kWh to the blockchain, providing the physical measurement that grounds every trade.

Hardware revision from PZEM-004T (Modbus wired) to WEM3080 (Wi-Fi + RS-485) demonstrated the ability to iterate the field device without changing the blockchain layer.

Technical Stack