Blockchain for Green Energy Ecosystems: Advancing Sustainability, Fair Trading, and ESG Management

Traditional energy infrastructure remains highly centralized and dependent on fossil fuels. These aging systems face major challenges, including inefficiency, costly intermediaries, and limited capacity to integrate renewable resources. Addressing climate change requires a rapid shift toward decentralized green power, such as residential solar and local wind, and managing this growth in distributed energy resources demands modern data and transaction systems that can ensure grid reliability and carbon accountability. Blockchain technology has emerged as a foundational catalyst for this transformation across energy markets and sustainable engineering. By providing an immutable, transparent, and decentralized ledger, blockchain removes reliance on centralized brokers and enables secure, real-time data exchange and automated transactions across complex networks. In energy trading and management, blockchain-driven smart contracts automate peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading, allowing local prosumers to buy and sell excess power directly within microgrids based on instantaneous local supply and demand. In sustainable engineering, blockchain secures structural lifecycles by offering unalterable tracking for supply chain emissions, automating the issuance of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), and standardizing tokenized carbon offset markets to eliminate greenwashing. Beyond energy systems, blockchain is increasingly transforming sustainable finance, ESG reporting, carbon accounting, and sustainability assurance. Its ability to provide transparent, immutable, and auditable records can enhance the credibility of sustainability disclosures, improve green investment assessment, and strengthen trust in carbon markets and ESG reporting frameworks. This Research Topic aims to democratize energy access by transforming passive consumers into active prosumers who generate, store, and trade power, and to accelerate the integration of intermittent renewables, such as solar and wind, into legacy utility networks. It also seeks to reduce greenwashing through secure, unalterable audit trails for green energy certificates and carbon offsets. Further goals include improving grid resilience by supporting localized microgrids that can operate independently during main grid failures, lowering transaction overheads by eliminating administrative and brokerage costs through automated code execution, and enabling algorithmic load balancing through autonomous, real-time matching of energy supply and demand using edge computing. Alongside accessibility and resilience, this Research Topic focuses on the role of blockchain in enhancing transparency, accountability, and auditability in ESG reporting, sustainability accounting, climate finance, and green investment ecosystems. These goals can be achieved through integrated algorithmic, technical, engineering, and policy efforts. Algorithmic and economic research should develop dynamic double-auction models for local energy trading and game-theoretic frameworks that ensure fair pricing for both low-income consumers and high-output prosumers. Technical solutions should focus on low-carbon consensus protocols for IoT devices, privacy-preserving cryptography using zero-knowledge proofs, and scalable transaction processing through sharding and layer-2 state channels. Engineering integration should establish cross-chain frameworks that allow platforms such as Ethereum and Hyperledger to share energy data securely, while hardware-software interfaces in smart meters can prevent physical data tampering. Finally, policy and regulatory work should design dynamic wheeling tariffs that reward peer-to-peer traders for reducing grid stress, and translate utility regulations into standardized, legally binding smart contract templates. This Research Topic welcomes contributions addressing fundamental challenges, novel architectures and systems, and impactful applications of blockchain in green energy ecosystems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 1. Decentralized Energy Markets & P2P Trading - Double-auction mechanisms for local energy trading - Localized energy pricing algorithms - Prosumer community market designs 2. Smart Contracts and Automation in Smart Grids - Automated demand response programs - EV charging optimization - Decentralized grid frequency regulation 3. Sustainability Tracking, Tokenization, and Carbon Markets - Tokenized carbon credits - Automated Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) issuance - Supply chain emissions tracking 4. Security, Privacy, and Scalability in Energy DLT - Zero-knowledge proofs for consumer privacy - High-throughput consensus protocols - Mitigation of smart contract vulnerabilities 5. Green Blockchain and Energy-Efficient Consensus - Lifecycle assessments of Proof-of-Stake versus Proof-of-Work - Energy-efficient consensus mechanisms for IoT devices 6. Blockchain for Sustainable Finance, ESG and Accounting - ESG reporting and disclosure - Sustainability accounting and assurance - Carbon accounting and emissions verification - Green bonds and tokenized sustainable assets - Climate finance and green investments - ESG data governance Topic editors: Anang Hudaya Muhamad Amin, Sonia Abdennadher, Sharul Sham Dol Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85743/blockchain-for-green-energy-ecosystems-advancing-sustainability-fair-trading-and-esg-management