The rapid growth of distributed renewable energy penetration is promoting the evolution of the energy system toward decentralization and decentralized and digitized smart grids. This study was based on energy blockchain, and developed a dual-biding mechanism based on the real-time energy surplus and demand in the local smart grid, which is expected to enable reliable, affordable, and clean energy supply in smart communities. In the proposed system, economic benefits could be achieved by replacing fossil-fuel-based electricity with the high penetration of affordable solar PV electricity. The reduction of energy surplus realized by distributed energy production and P2P energy trading, within the smart grid results in less transmission loss and lower requirements for costly upgrading of existing grids. By adopting energy blockchain and smart contract technologies, energy secure trading with a low risk of privacy leakage could be accommodated. The prototype is examined through a case study, and the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed mechanism are further validated by scenario analysis.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is one of the important initiatives widely used across different industries in reducing atmospheric carbon emissions, which is an essential environmental goal outlined in Sustainable Development Goal 13 (SDG 13) in 2015. In an effort to mitigate carbon-emission problem, CCS extracts (i.e., captures and compresses) and stores CO 2 from industrial by-products as an alternative to releasing it directly into the atmosphere. CCS presents opportunities for the captured CO 2 to immediate utilization or to be stored at adjacent facilities for future utilization in different industrial productions. Despite its potential in reducing carbon emissions, its effectiveness and possible economic incentivization are unknown due to a lack of transparency in tracking the quantitative output concerning carbon reduction at different stages of CCS activities (capture, transportation, and storage) currently deployed in different industrial plants. In this paper, we propose an enhanced CCS for recording and tracking the quantitative output of CCS activities using blockchain (i.e., a distributed-ledger) technology that promotes transparency among stakeholders, e.g., government, regulatory body, technical experts, and general public, and facilitates rewards toward effective carbon-emission reductions. Although blockchain is a promising technology that can increase the efficiency of CCS, we also identify a few future challenges, such as data privacy and scalability, that have to be taken into account toward implementing the proposed architecture.
Alessandro Neri, Maria Angela Butturi, Henrique L. Sauer, Francesco Lolli · 6 authors
The growing demand for electric vehicles necessitates an efficient and sustainable life-cycle management of lithium-ion batteries. This work examines existent literature on digital battery passports, crucial for high-quality data for decision-making purposes, and distributed ledger technologies as transparent and efficient enablers. An hybrid BWM-TOPSIS approach is employed to rank various platforms for digital passport implementation in an automotive company. The analysis identifies Hedera as the most suitable ledger, followed by IOTA and EOS. Future research directions include empirical validation of the findings and exploring collaborative decision-making models to enhance the robustness of the selection process.
The burgeoning interest in both the circular economy and blockchain technology has spurred numerous proposed integrations. Despite this enthusiasm, empirical research examining the practical feasibility and critical assessment of blockchain's potential within the circular economy remains limited. This study engages with eleven distinguished blockchain experts to critically analyze the prospects of technology integration across various facets of the circular economy, aiming to predict potential outcomes. Utilizing the Delphi method, this research seeks to attain a consensus on the experts' visions and opinions. The findings suggest a nuanced perspective: while certain integrations in the circular economy may face challenges and are unlikely to succeed, others could prove effective in the long term, provided specific conditions are met. When appropriately designed Tokenomics are in place, and the necessary level of digitalization is achieved, blockchain technology can significantly incentivize circular economy practices. However, the complete disintermediation of circular practices through blockchain is viewed as less feasible, owing to its reliance on external data providers.
Presently, majority of car-pooling services depend on a central third party which makes these platforms susceptible to data privacy, security concerns, and a single point of failure. Moreover, drivers and passengers are charged with different services fees by the electric mobility service provider. The emergence of emerging technologies such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) can foster trust, boost electric car-pooling business models. Hence, DLT is utilized to store electric car-pooling trips, drivers, and passengers’ information to ensure user privacy and maintain security. Similarly, social practice theories such as Community of Practice (CoP) is progressively considered as a significant structure within societies as it aids the development and sharing of resources across groups. But very little attention has been devoted to examined how CoP can be employed to support the design of decentralized on-demand electric car-pooling. Leveraging CoP and DLT, this paper proposes a decentralized community of practice-based model that enables drivers to publish electric car-pooling services and passengers to be matched to a driver without depending on a trusted third party. A systematic literature review was adopted to collect data and a case study of a decentralized on-demand electric car-pooling was presented. Findings from this study highlights conceptualization of CoP for improving decentralized on-demand electric car-pooling and provide insights on efficient decentralized mechanisms for electric car-pooling. Theoretically, this article identifies the current problems, state-of-the-art of decentralized electric car-pooling. For policy implications this study provides guidelines to effectively govern and manage the development of on-demand electric car-pooling for sustainable public transportation.
There is a growing interest in understanding the energy and environmental footprint of digital currencies, specifically in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These cryptocurrencies are operated by a geographically distributed network of computing nodes, making it hard to estimate their energy consumption accurately. Existing studies, both in academia and industry, attempt to model cryptocurrency energy consumption often based on a number of assumptions, for instance, about the hardware in use or the geographic distribution of the computing nodes. A number of these studies have already been widely criticized for their design choices and subsequent over- or under-estimation of energy use. In this study, we evaluate the reliability of prior models and estimates by leveraging existing scientific literature from fields cognizant of blockchain, such as social energy sciences and information systems. We first design a quality assessment framework based on existing research, and we then conduct a systematic literature review examining scientific and non-academic literature demonstrating common issues and potential avenues of addressing these issues. Our goal with this article is to to advance the field by promoting scientific rigor in studies focusing on blockchain energy footprint. To that end, we provide a novel set of codes of conduct for the five most widely used research methodologies: quantitative energy modeling, literature reviews, data analysis and statistics, case studies, and experiments. We envision that this code of conduct would assist in standardizing the design and assessment of studies focusing on blockchain-based systems' energy and environmental footprint.
In recent years, blockchain technology has seen significant growth and widespread adoption in various industries. However, one major drawback of blockchain investments is their substantial energy consumption, which has negative impacts on both the economy and the environment. The main cause of concern is the generation of atmospheric carbon emissions resulting from excessive energy usage. This research study aims to identify blockchain networks and systems that assert themselves as environmentally friendly and determine which of them produces the least amount of carbon emissions, such as Cardano, Tezos, and Bitgreen. This has been accomplished by following a comprehensive hybrid literature review. Our study has identified 23 blockchain networks that consume significantly less power and release fewer carbon dioxide emissions compared to the Bitcoin network. Some of these environmentally friendly networks include Algorand, Fantom, MobileCoin, and Electroneum. Additionally, we have found various projects and organizations that support greener blockchain initiatives, such as the Renewable Energy Certificate Mechanism, Green Digital Finance Alliance, GreenTrust, and the Energy Web Foundation. While several projects in this area have been recognized and examined, comprehensive research and analysis are still needed to provide empirical evidence regarding the power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of these claimed environmentally friendly blockchains. This is due to the relatively early stage of development in this field.
Geetanjali Rathee, Chaker Abdelaziz Kerrache, Carlos T. Calafate, Mohammed Seghir Halimi
Consumer Electronics (CE) are defined as one of the emerging trends where smart devices, such as refrigerators, smart phones, or house hold devices, generate a huge amount of information by communicating among each other without any human intervention. Yet, the speed of producing such products greatly differs from what would be an optimal utilization and integration of such devices in the environment. In addition, generating and transmitting huge amounts of data within heterogeneous networks produces e-wastage (excessive storage, energy and computational requirements) that further leads to environmental crises, and that can raise severe security problems in terms of network trustworthiness, as the information is conveyed using an open channel, i.e., the Internet. In this regard, most of the solutions reported in the literature are inadequate to handle the aforementioned issues. Hence, in this paper, we propose a lightweight solution to secure the information transmission in one of the most relevant applications of CE, i.e. IIoT networks, using an ML-based Hidden Markov Model (HMM) whereby we compute the degree of trust associated to the different devices based on a blockchain mechanism. In our proposal, an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is used to inspect the continuous behaviour of each node, and a blockchain network ensures the transparency and security in the network. The proposed technique is validated against existing mechanisms using various security metrics. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique is more effective in terms of malicious node identification in comparison to existing schemes.
Catherine Mulligan, Suzanne G. Morsfield, Evîn Cheikosman
Blockchain technology has been proposed to achieve sustainable development through various solutions, such as carbon credit trading, energy systems and supply chain management. While existing literature has not covered this topic in a structured fashion, this paper provides insights to policymakers on how blockchain can deliver sustainable development. This study conducted a systematic literature review on the role of blockchain technologies in assisting policymakers in achieving ESG and environmental sustainability goals. The paper performs a detailed PRISMA SLR analysis of 10,188 technical and policy papers sourced from Scopus and IEEE databases to ensure high-quality inputs and breadth of coverage across relevant sources. In addition, the study reviews the relevant regulatory environment related to ESG, including SDGs, IPCC, COP 27, ESMA, ISSB, SEC, GRI, TCFD, ESRS, IFRS S1 and S2 and CRSD. Most papers do not outline a structured approach to applying blockchain in the emerging regulatory environment. Our paper outlines recommendations to policymakers wishing to ensure that the blockchain research community and solutions proposed are usefully directed to enable the world to achieve its net zero goals.
This poster submission introduces "Tokens in Mind", an Unplugged board game designed to teach K-12 students about the ecological and economic aspects of Non-Fungible Tokens including the basic ideas of Blockchain Technology. Although Blockchain technology has been a major breakthrough of this millennium and is being researched extensively at its core, there have been few serious attempts to transfer the concepts for educational purposes. The same applies to the research on the integration of Non-Fungible Tokens at school level. To work on this literature and potential research gap, we invented the board game "Tokens in Mind". In the board game the players need to buy and trade Non-Fungible Tokens, interact with physical "Ether-Coins" and also have to care about an environmental currency called "Eco-Coin" to fulfill several predefined goals. The board game does not require any technical aids like computers, making it accessible to a wider range of students.
Decentralized applications (dApp) have proliferated in recent years, but their long-term viability is a topic of debate. However, for dApps to be sustainable, and suitable for integration into a larger service networks, they need to attract users and promise reliable availability. Therefore, assessing their longevity is crucial. Analyzing the utilization trajectory of a service is, however, challenging due to several factors, such as demand spikes, noise, autocorrelation, and non-stationarity. In this study, we employ robust statistical techniques to identify trends in currently popular dApps. Our findings demonstrate that a significant proportion of dApps, across a range of categories, exhibit statistically significant positive overall trends, indicating that success in decentralized computing can be sustainable and transcends specific fields. However, there is also a substantial number of dApps showing negative trends, with a disproportionately high number from the decentralized finance (DeFi) category. Furthermore, a more detailed inspection of time series segments shows a clearly diminishing proportion of positive trends from mid-2021 to the present. In summary, we conclude that the dApp economy might have lost some momentum, and that there is a strong element of uncertainty regarding its future significance.
In a world where sustainable and collaborative behavior is increasingly important due to climate change, environmental concerns, and social engagement, individual willpower may not be enough to sustain positive behavior for long-term sustainability. To encourage collaborative behavior, many blockchain-based applications are emerging that provide an incentive in the form of fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), or reputation points. Existing services address specific solutions such as waste disposal, peer-to-peer energy management, and sustainable mobility. However, the tokens issued by these services generally can be used only by the services themselves and are not interchangeable with other tokens. This paper proposes a platform that aggregates different blockchain-based services, and that exploits a conversion mechanism enabling the user to convert a given service token with other service tokens. The conversion is not based on a monetary value, rather, it relies on the amount of saved CO2 a service token represents. The platform provides a token (the “sCO2” token) anchored to a fixed amount of saved CO2, that may be converted for token of other services or used to get a discount on various municipal services such as waste tax, parking, public transport, etc. The proposed system aims to increase the engagement and awareness among citizens and end-users, provide an accountable and transparent way to track people’s sustainable behavior, and issue certificates to organizations based on how much CO2 their services have helped save.
Digital Products Passports (DPPs) are digital documents accompanying individual product items and carrying data pertaining to product's life cycle; material and methods used in manufacturing, product distribution network, carbon footprint and environmental impact, context and time of use, and other. DPPs were first introduced in the EU Green Deal and are envisioned as a tool to facilitate the transition to a Circular Economy. Data stored and carried on DPPs will help inform policy making as well as consumer behavior. However, the wide scope of use cases and market sectors under consideration pose significant challenges in deriving a generic DPP system design. This makes difficult the development of corresponding standards, which in turn hinders market stakeholders from onboarding the use of DPPs. We address this problem by means of a DPP use case framework that captures the core underlying structure of DPP use cases that is common in its many application areas. We also present a technical architecture for DPP systems based on Distributed Ledger Technologies and Smart Contracts and provide the code for a working prototype. We conclude by discussing future extensions of this work, particularly with respect to evaluating the performance of our implementation.
Jonathan Heiss, Tahir Oegel, Mehran Shakeri, Stefan Tai
<p>In face of the ongoing climate change, both reduction and offsetting of carbon emissions are critical. To this end, accurate, reliable emission data, and service-oriented architectures for processing the data are needed. Current carbon accounting practices, however, are often error-prone, costly, and time-consuming. Even in digital monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems, the employment of single, trusted verification bodies inhibits transparent, fine-granular, and verifiable accounting on product instance-level in high-throughput supply chains. We propose Verifiable Carbon Accounting (VCA) as a novel accounting approach that leverages authenticity and zero-knowledge proofs in service-oriented architectures for creating non-disclosing emission reports that are peer-to-peer verifiable on blockchains. VCA builds upon and extends both conventional and digital MRV systems but ensures the confidentiality of business emission data and calculations while allowing for peer-to-peer transparency and verifiability. We introduce the concept and demonstrate VCA application for accounting product carbon footprints (PCFs) in supply chains. We present a proof-of-concept technical system design and implementation and discuss experimental findings, deriving both insights on VCA practicability and next steps. Overall, we show how VCA advances the state of art in carbon accounting in and beyond supply chains, and how VCA can serve as the basis for next-generation, accurate carbon accounting.</p>
Guilherme Albuquerque, Carlo Kleber da Silva Rodrigues
Zcash is a proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency that has gained attention due to its promise of enhanced user privacy. Notwithstanding, Zcash’s thorough acceptance notably depends on how profitable its mining process can be. To tackle this issue, we propose an analytical model to compute the mining hashrate under solo mining to achieve a liquid revenue equal to the minimum wage in the United States. In the sequence, we then estimate how profitable Zcash solo mining is based on that computed mining hasrate. Our proposed model spans crucial parameters of the whole mining process. In the experiments, we compare Zcash with the popular Bitcoin and also present a competitive analysis encompassing the ten top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Final results highlight that: (i) Zcash owns a value of hmin which is about eight orders of magnitude smaller than that of Bitcoin in all investigated scenarios, which refer to the ten least and most expensive american states in terms of electricity tariff; and (ii) Zcash is the second best cryptocurrency for solo mining among the aforementioned ten cryptocurrencies, being the only one whose protocol implements the concept of zero-knowledge proofs. Within this context, our key contribution is to provide the scientific literature with valuable insights to formally pave the way to develop practical analytical models for PoW-cryptocurrency systems, which may be chiefly valuable regarding competitive analyses in general.
The main objective of this article is to present a prototype that integrates blockchain and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to digitize information across a generic Supply Chain (SC). Blockchain bring many benefits to the operation of improving provenance and reliability, such as, digitizing the interaction among SC actors to allow implementation of smart contracts to support a secure and authenticated chain. In technical terms, blockchain is a decentralized database where information recording is secure and blockchain-based traceability in the SC can address shortcomings that exist in centralized solutions. Provenance could be achieved by implementing SC business logic within smart contracts using blockchains. This article presents an architecture of software that combines blockchain with IoT devices that allows traceability of a generic product from source to destination, through multi-echelon suppliers, logistics, manufacturers to the end-customer. The presented software architecture uses the Solana blockchain for the implementation of SC processes and business logic. This blockchain was selected from a review, reported in this article, of several widely used blockchain networks. It was selected mainly due to its speed and cost of transactions. Within the blockchain we store SC related data and events communicated over the internet and mobile application channels, in a Solana blockchain using Solana's native blockchain libraries. the IoT devices used are Sigfox cloud gateway, and Sensit that uses LPWAN (Low power wide area network) wireless telecommunication for data transfer. In our IoT device, the blockchain stores temperature, humidity, light, location, tilting, door opening, vibration, and magnetic field. The goal is to use existing technologies to develop a software architecture for a medium term objective of an implementable generic blockchain for SCs.
Emanuele Pagone, A. L. Hart, Konstantinos Salonitis
Cryptocurrencies are a digital form of money based on the blockchain technology. Their relatively recent raise in popularity and use, together with the energy-intensive nature of some of their algorithms, has raised environmental concerns about growing energy consumption (and associated carbon dioxide emissions). This paper aims at comparing the environmental impact of the most common cryptocurrency (i.e., Bitcoin) and fiat currencies (i.e. coins, banknotes, credit and debit card networks). Such comparison is carried out assessing and analyzing the life cycle main phases of each currency in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. Results show that Bitcoin has a carbon footprint almost 4 to 5 times greater than the sum of all forms of traditional currency together in one year. Furthermore, environmental impact “hotspots” of fiat currency including raw material production of coins, transportation of banknotes and electric energy consumption of ATMs are identified. Finally, considering future scenarios and the sensitivity of various parameters on the results, some solutions are proposed to reduce the environmental impact of currencies.
Blockchain technology and, more generally, distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems, face public scrutiny for their energy consumption levels. However, many point out that high energy consumption is a feature of (small block size) proof-of-work (PoW) DLTs, but not of proof-of-stake (PoS) DLTs. With the energy consumption of PoS systems being an under-researched area, we replicate, expand and update embryonary work modelling it and comparing different PoS-based DLTs with each other and with other non-PoS systems. In doing so, we suggest and implement a number of improvements to an existing PoS energy consumption model. We find that there may be significant differences in the energy consumption of PoS systems analysed and confirm that, regardless of these differences, their energy consumption is several orders of magnitude below that of Bitcoin Core.
The participation of prosumers in demand-response programs is essential for the success of demand-side management in renewable-powered energy grids. Unfortunately, the engagement is still low due to concerns related to the privacy of their energy data used in the prediction processes. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based distributed federated learning (FL) technique for energy-demand prediction that combines FL with blockchain to provide data privacy and trust features for energy prosumers. The privacy-sensitive energy data are stored locally at edge prosumer nodes without revealing it to third parties, with only the learned local model weights being shared using a blockchain network. The global federated model is not centralized but distributed and replicated over the blockchain overlay, ensuring the model immutability and provenance of parameter updates. We had proposed smart contracts to deal with the integration of local machine-learning prediction models with the blockchain, defining functions for the model parameters’ scaling and reduction of blockchain overhead. The centralized, local-edge, and blockchain-integrated models are comparatively evaluated for prediction of energy demand 24 h ahead using a multi-layer perceptron model and the monitored energy data of several prosumers. The results show only a slight decrease in prediction accuracy in the case of blockchain-based distributed FL with reliable data privacy support compared with the centralized learning solution.
With the deepening application of blockchain technology, exaggerating its empowering effects has become common. In recent years, the rational assessment of the maturity of blockchain technology applications in digital projects in different fields has been the focus of attention and identified as the key to improving the implementation effect of various digital projects. Although some studies have obtained substantial research results on technology maturity and its derivative applications, which can be used to predict the overall trend of a technology or guide the implementation of the technology on the ground, few studies have evaluated the maturity of blockchain technology in combination with different application scenarios. Our study combines application scenarios and the technical characteristics of blockchain technology and proposes an evaluation system for blockchain technology application maturity consisting of five primary indicators, that is, key application requirements, data security, process complexity, application ecological completeness, and technical performance requirements, and their corresponding secondary indicators. In addition, we take digital government public service projects as application scenarios and use the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) entropy method and expert scoring method to determine the weights corresponding to each index in the assessment system and construct a blockchain technology application maturity assessment model. Moreover, we apply the model to ten typical digital government public service projects to conduct a comprehensive assessment and analysis. By comparing the indicator scores of the different projects, we analyze the project characteristics influencing blockchain technology application maturity and provide suggestions for applying “blockchain + digital government public services”.
There is a growing interest in understanding the energy and environmental footprint of digital currencies, specifically in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These cryptocurrencies are operated by a geographically distributed network of computing nodes, making it hard to accurately estimate their energy consumption. Existing studies, both in academia and industry, attempt to model the cryptocurrencies energy consumption often based on a number of assumptions for instance about the hardware in use or geographic distribution of the computing nodes. A number of these studies has already been widely criticized for their design choices and subsequent over or under-estimation of the energy use. In this study, we evaluate the reliability of prior models and estimates by leveraging existing scientific literature from fields cognizant of blockchain such as social energy sciences and information systems. We first design a quality assessment framework based on existing research, we then conduct a systematic literature review examining scientific and non-academic literature demonstrating common issues and potential avenues of addressing these issues. Our goal with this article is to to advance the field by promoting scientific rigor in studies focusing on Blockchain's energy footprint. To that end, we provide a novel set of codes of conduct for the five most widely used research methodologies: quantitative energy modeling, literature reviews, data analysis \& statistics, case studies, and experiments. We envision that these codes of conduct would assist in standardizing the design and assessment of studies focusing on blockchain-based systems' energy and environmental footprint.
This paper presents a method to implement cooperative Demand Side Management (DSM) approaches over a distributed communication network. Our method combines a decentralized DSM approach called Profile Steering with two distributed consensus mechanisms Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). We make use of a network manager to moderate the network and a distributed ledger system to store the power profiles from each planning period.We evaluate our approach using publicly-available real data from 25 houses. We successfully implemented our distributed approach in Python using JSON files as blocks and performed time-performance evaluations of this implementation. We show that, distributed DSM for day-ahead planning using blockchain concepts is possible and adds an overhead of only 0.98 seconds and 3.99 seconds in the case of PoW and PoS respectively.
Matthias Babel, Vincent Gramlich, Marc-Fabian Körner, Johannes Sedlmeir · 6 authors
Abstract In the energy transition, there is an urgent need for decreasing overall carbon emissions. Against this background, the purposeful and verifiable tracing of emissions in the energy system is a crucial key element for promoting the deep decarbonization towards a net zero emission economy with a market-based approach. Such an effective tracing system requires end-to-end information flows that link carbon sources and sinks while keeping end consumers’ and businesses’ sensitive data confidential. In this paper, we illustrate how non-fungible tokens with fractional ownership can help to enable such a system, and how zero-knowledge proofs can address the related privacy issues associated with the fine-granular recording of stakeholders’ emission data. Thus, we contribute to designing a carbon emission tracing system that satisfies verifiability, distinguishability, fractional ownership, and privacy requirements. We implement a proof-of-concept for our approach and discuss its advantages compared to alternative centralized or decentralized architectures that have been proposed in the past. Based on a technical, data privacy, and economic analysis, we conclude that our approach is a more suitable technical backbone for end-to-end digital carbon emission tracing than previously suggested solutions.