When Energy Data Becomes Institutional Reality: Blockchain-Secured Digital Twins, Certification, and Accountability in Sustainable Urban Infrastructure

Sustainable urban infrastructure increasingly relies on blockchain-secured energy digital twins to improve energy-data verification, transparency, traceability, and trust across construction, operation, certification, and compliance. Yet the prevailing literature still treats these systems primarily as descriptive mirrors of physical infrastructure, emphasizing their ability to capture, verify, and protect data on energy production, consumption, storage, and exchange. Verified records can underpin institutional outcomes such as certification and compliance—but this framing ignores a deeper change: blockchain-secured digital twins may help automate the constitution of those outcomes, rather than only representing infrastructure performance. This conceptual study develops the Automated Constitution Model (ACM), which explains the conditions under which blockchain-secured energy digital-twin records transition from epistemic verification to institutionally recognized outcomes and how accountability is redistributed across the socio-technical actors involved in that transition. The model defines seven interconnected layers: physical infrastructure, measurement, digital representation, cryptographic attestation, rule interpretation and execution, institutional outcome, and legitimacy/accountability. Lower layers are epistemic—they measure, represent, and validate physical energy events. The shift occurs when encoded rule systems, such as smart contracts, certification logic, compliance frameworks, and market-governance protocols, interpret cryptographically attested records to generate recognized institutional outputs such as renewable energy certificates, settlement claims, compliance statuses, payment rights, and ownership records, rendering the higher layers ontological and normative. This study contributes to blockchain governance, digital twins, and sustainable infrastructure research by theorizing blockchain-secured digital twins as systems of automated institutional constitution rather than mere information-integrity tools. It also surfaces a growing accountability gap: as institutional outcomes increasingly rely on encoded rules, platform designers, data modelers, authors of smart contracts, certifiers, and regulators may share accountability with physical actors.