Data security and protection in blockchain-based local energy markets for smart cities

Abstract

In the last years, the improvements in distributed ledger technologies brought disruptive improvements in the management of distributed energy resources. The availability of public, immutable and trustless ledgers allowed for the creation of decentralized energy exchange platforms, potentially held in an autonomous way by smart distributed devices. However, the vast amount of data exchanged in these processes, and its potentially infinite lifetime once shared on distributed ledger technologies, posed different privacy and information security issues. In this view, this paper proposes a methodology for performing autonomous, decentralized and secure local energy markets, which does not disclose sensitive information about the user or the market itself. The proposed methodology has been applied on a Hardware in the Loop experimental setup and proved to provide a privacy-safe and fair way to manage a distributed resources in an energy community and/or smart city context.