Recent Advances Towards Securing Smart Grids with Blockchain

Abstract

The smart grid was introduced as an evolved version of the traditional power grid to enable two-way communication between consumers and electricity providers. It aims to distribute energy generation points that utilize renewable energy and enable energy trading among users. However, this grid has an increasing number of components, including consumers, prosumers, generation plants, and electric vehicles. Managing them using a centralized architecture approach introduces several challenges such as single points of failure and cyberattacks. To address this issue, blockchain technology was proposed as an infrastructure to secure the smart grid. The latter provides a distributed ledger that handles transactions in a safe environment. However, despite all its advantages, blockchain has several scalability and privacy protection issues. In this paper, we highlight the state-of-the-art of blockchain-based smart grids works. The article also provides a comprehensive survey on the challenges that face blockchain-based smart grids and points out timely future research topics.