Blockchain-based Advanced Information Infrastructure and its Applications in Demand-Side Energy Systems

Abstract

The energy sector is moving from centralised one-way power systems to decentralised bidirectional smart grids driven by distributed energy resources (DERs). This shift requires infrastructure for secure coordination, verifiable markets, and prosumer data privacy. Existing blockchain systems have limited scalability, security, and interoperability, restricting high-frequency smart-grid applications. This thesis designs blockchain infrastructure for peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and power load forecasting (PLF).

It has three theoretical innovation points. First, a dual-blockchain architecture with an Improved Optimistic Rollup (IOR) improves vertical throughput by offloading heavy computation from a primary to a secondary blockchain. Second, a Transaction Batch Generation (TBG) protocol for leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerance (LBFT) consensus improves horizontal throughput by letting every node broadcast blocks, avoiding redundant transaction rebroadcast, and reducing transaction censorship to nearly zero. Third, a Blockchain-of-Blockchains (BoB) architecture, with Cross-Chain Token Exchange (CCTE) and Cross-Chain Data Interoperability (CCDI), supports asset and data transfer across blockchains with lower latency and memory overhead.

The infrastructure is applied to two demand-side problems. For P2P market clearing, it is combined with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), D-TASK, and TEAR-DO to address the privacy-robustness-latency trilemma: prosumer data remain private, distributed optimisation preserves optimal convergence, and clearing time is reduced by an order of magnitude over state-of-the-art methods. For PLF, CTP-FL combines the infrastructure with message coding and commitment-based dual consensus to preserve local-model privacy, tolerate Byzantine faults at client and server sides, and keep communication latency below local model training time.