Smart Energy Trading for the Blockchain Miners in the Interconnected Multi-Microgrids

In blockchain networks, each new block should be validated by some especial computers called miners. Knowing that the mining process is a complex and time-consuming operation that consumes too much electrical energy, it will be more beneficial for miner owners to buy their necessary electrical energy from microgrids instead of buying energy from the more expensive power grid. In this paper, we present a peer to peer energy trading algorithm for energy trading in an interconnected multi-microgrid (IMM) system consists of several microgrids. We first evaluate the profitability of Bitcoin miners, as a currency powered by blockchain technology, in terms of electrical energy price, blockchain network parameters and communication network characteristics. Then, we introduce an integer linear program (ILP) optimization problem which is run by the miner controller to optimally decide to switch off nonefficient miners. We present a smart energy trading algorithm for trading energy inside each microgrid and between microgrids in the IMM system. A convex optimization problem to find the optimal values of traded energy between each pair of MGs in the IMM system is presented. The simulation results confirm the superiority of the proposed smart energy trading algorithm for both energy buyers (miner farms) and energy sellers (microgrids)