Individual Green Certificates on Blockchain: A Simulation Approach

Distributed renewable energy offers an exciting opportunity for sustainable transition and climate change mitigation. However, it is overlooked in most of the conventional tradable green certificates programs. Blockchain shows an advantage of incorporating a galaxy of distributed prosumers in a transparent and low-cost manner. This paper proposes I-Green, a blockchain-based individual green certificates system for promoting voluntary adoption of distributed renewable energy. Combing the features of blockchain technology and the theories of social norm and peer effects, the novel green ratio incentive scheme and proof of generation consensus protocol are designed for I-Green. A blockchain simulator is constructed to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of I-Green system. The simulation results present its potential for facilitating widespread adoption of distributed generation, and confirm the feasibility of blockchain as the information communication technology (ICT).