Joint Pricing for Carbon and Electricity Trading in Blockchain-based Smart Grids: A Two-stage Game Approach

Reducing carbon emissions and integrating renewable energy sources (RES) are two critical concerns in smart grids. Considering the distributed nature of carbon emission rights (CER) and RES trading, this paper presents a two-stage carbon and electricity trading framework based on blockchain. In particular, a two-stage game-based joint pricing scheme is proposed. In the first stage, the CER pricing for peer-to-peer (P2P) trading is formulated with the Bayesian game, which determines the optimal CER price for both sides without leaking bidding privacy. Then, in the second stage, a Stackelberg game model is used to establish different electricity pricing relationships between conventional energy source users and RES users. RES users can obtain more competitive electricity prices, thereby promoting the utilization of RES. Both stages ensure the accurate execution of pricing strategies through the smart contract, guaranteeing fairness and transparency. Finally, a prototype system based on the Fabric blockchain is implemented, and extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of emission reduction and improvement of user utility.