ScaleNex: A Scalable Blockchain-Powered Electricity Market Implementation for Smart Grid Environment

Decentralized electricity markets in the smart grid environment enable energy exchange among prosumers, but current blockchain solutions face significant challenges related to scalability and privacy. Public blockchains raise privacy concerns, while permissioned blockchains often struggle to scale. This paper presents ScaleNex, a novel blockchain-based electricity market framework designed to overcome these limitations. Leveraging Hyperledger Fabric, ScaleNex employs a hierarchical multi-blockchain architecture that distributes operations across multiple blockchains, enhancing scalability while preserving end-user privacy. This is achieved by assigning users to blockchain implementations at three different jurisdictional levels and geographical areas, and by utilizing aggregated electricity orders that are efficiently scaled using fuzzy logic to facilitate transactions between blockchains, thereby concealing end-user information. A performance evaluation with 1,056 prosumers demonstrates throughput improvements of 5.7% to 82% and latency reductions up to 50%, along with enhanced privacy compared to existing blockchain solutions. These findings underscore the potential for broader implementation of ScaleNex, offering an effective solution to the critical challenges of scalability, and privacy in decentralized electricity markets.