Towards net-zero goal through altruistic prosumer based energy trading among connected electric vehicles

The motivation to protect environment and reduce CO2 emissions has resulted in increase in number of electric vehicle (EV) users. However, the rising number of EVs leads to increasing electricity demands and aggravates the burden on existing energy distribution systems. Therefore, the distributed energy systems, where consumers can also sell their surplus energy are required to overcome the potential challenges of high energy demands predicted in future. Furthermore, the consumers are now inclined towards buying energy from a renewable source to reduce environmental damage. Therefore, the sellers willing to contribute towards environmental sustainability also need to be encouraged to generate energy at a small scale through renewable sources and offer them at cheap prices. This paper proposes an energy trading system where both EVs and immobile users, such as houses and buildings, act as prosumers. They can buy or sell energy for both monetary incentives as well as for altruistic aim of environmental sustainability. A 5Genabled aggregator is proposed to manage the energy trading system through blockchain and smart contracts for maintaining security and immutability in transactions and verify energy sources. Stackelberg non-cooperative and cooperative games are formulated to strategize incentives of prosumers reflecting both altruism and monetary incentives. Complexity analysis and probabilistic calculations are performed to theoretically analyze the proposed system. Simulation results show more than 90% and 60% successful energy transactions when only seller is EV and when both buyers and sellers are EVs, respectively.