Abstract

     With the advent of new technologies and globalization of business, supply chains have turned into indispensable tools for gaining competitive advantage. The application of new technologies like blockchain can benefit sustainable energy supply chains by improving chain and logistics operations in the areas of trust, transparency and accountability, cooperation, information sharing, financial exchanges, and supply chain integration. However, the efforts to adopt such technologies in supply chains tend to face many challenges and challenges, which can seriously threaten their success. Therefore, it is crucial to carefully examine the challenges to blockchain technology application. This research focuses on identifying the criteria and challenges to the application of blockchain in renewable energy supply chains and also ranks the identified challenges in terms of their capacity to disrupt the process. The applicability of the suggested structure is examined in a case study of the renewable energy supply chain of Iran. In this study, the challenges are evaluated and ranked by the hybrid developed methods by the integration of the concept of gray numbers into the gray stepwise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA-Gray) and the gray evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS-Gray). Another group of hybrid methods including the gray weighted sum method (WSM-Gray), the gray complex proportional assessment (COPRAS-Gray), and the gray technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS-Gray) is used to validate the results. The rankings obtained from all of these techniques show high degree of correlation. Among the identified challenges, “high investment cost” is found to be the most important challenge to the application of blockchain in sustainable energy supply chains.

Introduction

     In today’s ever-changing world, supply chain networks tend to have diverse needs in terms of information assessment and risk management, which could be difcult to address (Ivanov et al., 2018). Indeed, the evolution of information and communications technologies (ICT) is constantly changing the requirements and capabilities of logistics and supply chain management (Goldsby & Zinn 2016). In recent years, blockchain has been hailed as a ground-breaking technology capable of transforming the form and size of businesses and how they conduct transactions (Behnke & Janssen 2020). Blockchain and Bitcoin were introduced by the person (or persons) using the pseudonym Nakamoto in 2008 (Nakamoto, 2008). Since its advent, this decentralized currency and transaction technology has been a major driver of change in business and is expected to play an even larger role in both the industry and service sectors (Iansiti 2017). The impetus behind the invention of blockchain was the lack of a transparent and sustainable independent decentralized fnancial system (Christidis & Devetsikiotis 2016). Blockchain prevents forgery and fake transactions by building encrypted blocks of all transaction records and storing them across the web such that they are constantly validated. Furthermore, the use of intelligent agreements in blockchain to control operations improves transaction transparency and increases trust among users (Constantinides et al. 2018). It has been argued that blockchain technology can modify numerous sectors of the economy, including supply chain management (Hofmann & Rüsch 2017), and may have far-reaching economic, social, and environmental impacts (Mathivathanan et al. 2021).

Conclusions and recommendations

     The advent of new technologies in recent decades has transformed how people do business across the world. This also applies to supply chains, and especially energy generation chains, which have undergone signifcant changes in the past decades. The application of new technologies like blockchain can beneft sustainable energy supply chains by improving chain and logistics operations in the areas of trust, transparency and accountability, cooperation, information sharing, fnancial exchanges, and supply chain integration. Blockchain technology can indeed have extensive economic, social and environmental impacts and hinder or accelerate sustainable development. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider adopting this technology in sustainable energy supply chains. However, as with all innovations, early adopters of this technology tend to face some resistance as well as unforeseen challenges. Blockchain has several features that can create challenges to its practical application. A survey of the research literature showed that the greatest studies on the application of blockchain have only provided case examples for this process in diferent contexts. Also, only a few studies have tried to systematically identify and evaluate the criteria and challenges to the application of blockchain in supply chains. To discuss this space in the literature, this research frst identifed the criteria of and practical challenges to the application of blockchain in a renewable energy supply chain and then ranked the identifed challenges. The ranking was conducted by the combined use of gray numbers and SWARA and EDAS. Also, WSM-G, COPRAS-G, and TOPSIS-G techniques were used to validate the fndings.