Blockchain-Based Management of Shared Energy Assets Using a Smart Contract Ecosystem

Energy markets are facing challenges regarding a changing energy generation and consumption structure, as well as the coordination of an increasing number of assets, devices and stakeholders. We address these challenges by introducing a blockchain-based smart contract ecosystem as our contribution to extant research. Apart from blockchain-specific benefits (e.g. data integrity and smart contract execution), the ecosystem fosters energy-blockchain research through the creation of digital assets. Doing so, we address research gaps identified by previous authors. From our work, we can derive economic implications regarding the foundation of local energy markets, the incentivization of grid-stabilizing behavior and the settlement of collective action problems.