Blockchain is a distributed digital ledger system that establishes transparent contract processes and facilitates secure but trusted business transactions. Policy‐makers around the world are intrigued by the potential of this emerging technology to solve policy problems, including the challenges of the transition away from centralised, linear models of energy generation and consumption towards decentralised and distributed energy systems. Blockchain has also been promoted as a mechanism to transform carbon markets, yet the focus in this area to date has been on using blockchain to create new carbon market schemes. This paper addresses an important research gap by asking how blockchain could be applied to an existing carbon market. To answer this question, the study uses an established design process to develop an Australian carbon market blockchain design. The paper finds that this design could improve the efficiency, equity and effectiveness of the Australian carbon market. This paper makes an important research contribution to carbon market policy development by developing a blockchain design that could improve how an existing carbon market functions, and the findings presented here are relevant to government and industry stakeholders globally.
To reduce vehicle emissions and to save the depleting fuel resources, Electric Vehicles (EVs) are gaining more attention due to low operating cost and less carbon footprint. The Renewable Energy Sources (RES) such as Solar PV can be suitably used for fulfilling the high energy demands of EVs. In addition, EVs can be used to provide ancillary services such as energy storage, spinning reserve, frequency and voltage regulation for Grid-connected environment. The major challenge is to develop EV charging station integrated with RES, Grid Power and Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in order to provide these ancillary services. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for monitoring solar PV based EV community charging station and load frequency regulation using Blockchain technology. In addition, we propose Smart Energy Management Controller (SEMC) which optimally decides the EV charge and discharge operation by considering the present capacity, frequency of the Grid and solar PV availability. We integrate Blockchain technology with the SEMC to record EV owner information, energy status and financial transactions while fulfilling different requirements viz; Owner privacy, data immutability, energy data transparency, tracking and availability with the improved trust among the users. The key features of the proposed framework are analysed.
The growing global population and the consequential increasing food demand have had a great impact on the environment and thus on the climate. Efforts are being made to reduce carbon footprint to mitigate such effects. Calculating the carbon footprint of food products is complex and requires the cooperation of all the stakeholders of the food supply chain. A record keeping system for tracking carbon footprint while preserving privacy for the related parties is needed. This paper presents a new implementation of blockchain for tracking of carbon footprint on food production and transportation stages. We designed a system that tracks the carbon footprint of food processing facilities and transportation parties using cluster-based record keeping while preserving their privacy. We implemented the proposed carbon footprint chain and evaluated its throughput and latency under different scenarios. We show that our blockchain implementation is capable of operating with a larger number of nodes without any scalability issues.
Food Waste Reduction and Sustainability
Energy, Environment, and Transportation Policies
Agriculture Sustainability and Environmental Impact
This paper is one of four in a series that reviews the potential application of blockchain technology in market-based instruments to improve transparency and, consequently, sustainability in the energy value chain in several jurisdictions.
The research in these four papers underpins “Blockchain for Governance of Sustainability Transparency in the Global Energy Value Chain” which can be found at:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3236753.
In this paper, the author considers the legal and regulatory frameworks for India. From a regulation and policy perspective, the author explores challenges and possibilities for the use of blockchain technology for market based instruments for sustainability, specifically, green certificates and white certificates. The paper also considers the application of blockchain to improve transparency at various stages of the energy value chain.
Yuting Pan, Xiaosong Zhang, Yi Wang, Junhui Yan · 7 authors
This paper introduces the similarity between the mechanism of carbon trading and blockchain, then it elaborates on the application of blockchain in carbon trading. In corporate carbon trading, blockchain technology can record and transfer information flow reliably, realize point-to-point transactions between suppliers and demanders to achieve “decentralization”, help to reduce the entry threshold for the carbon trading market. At the same time, an analysis of social environment for blockchain-based carbon trading on person is made. Finally, the paper confirms the value of "blockchain + carbon trading" and looks forward to the future.
This letter proposes a novel demurrage mechanism for blockchain electricity marketplaces, whereby the redemptive value of energy-backed tokens declines with time. This mechanism is intended to reward organic price-responsive load shifting by incentivising the consumption of electricity when it is locally abundant. To demonstrate how such a demurrage mechanism might function in practice, this letter describes a mixed complementarity model of a notional token marketplace. These market simulations indicate that, in equilibrium and with rational actors, the demurrage mechanism creates price signals that temporally align the production and consumption of electricity.
The proliferation of electric vehicles and active distribution network has brought many uncertainties to the power system. If the power system involves battery-swap stations of electric vehicles, it is difficult to ensure the data security during the distributed scheduling. To solve the problem, this paper sets up a collaborative optimization model for distributed scheduling based on blockchain consensus mechanism, considering the battery-swap stations. The power system was divided into three levels: the transmission network level, the distribution network level and the battery-swap station level. Next, the objective functions were constructed to minimize the generation cost and daily load variance on each level, and the optimal scheduling plan for the power system was solved through multi-level collaborative optimization. The blockchain consensus mechanism was adopted to verify the accuracy of the transaction data, and the production data of all entities were encoded by hash function before storage, such that the data are tamper resistant and traceable. The example analysis shows that our model can effectively reduce the generation cost, lower the daily load variance, and enhance system stability. The research findings shed new light on maintaining the optimization efficiency and data confidentiality of modern power network.
The issues in charging guiding for electric vehicles are meaningful studies in recent years, especially for electric taxis which need to be recharged during working hours. However, with the popularity of taxi-booking apps, how to obtain an effective charging guiding for taxis having advance orders becomes an urgent problem to be solved. To optimize various special interests while satisfying the constraints of online advance orders, a charging guiding strategy based on consortium blockchain is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a taxi charging guiding architecture based on consortium blockchain is designed, and an improved practical byzantine fault tolerance algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of charging information disconnection and trust between multiple charging station operators. Secondly, we establish the charging guiding model for electric taxis based on multi-objective optimization. The model aims to meet the constraints of online advance orders, maximize passengers' satisfaction and operators' service efficiency, and minimize the charging costs of taxis. Finally, the optimization model is solved by quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed guiding strategy, main urban areas of a city are taken as examples for simulation. The results show that the proposed strategy has increased the passengers' satisfaction by 0.44%, and has decreased the expense cost, the time cost and distance cost by 2.38%, 5.72%, and 17.25% respectively, comparing with PSO based strategy while balancing the utilization of charging equipment.
Crypto economy, first mentioned in 1996, started shaping at the beginning of 2009, after Bitcoin network launch. Being a new phenomenon, Crypto economy causes both great enthusiasm and serious concerns related to its impact on the environment. The amount of electricity consumed by Crypto economy is comparable to the annual consumption by such countries as Chile and Venezuela. The influence of Crypto economy on the planet?s ecosystem is growing at a significant pace. Even though there are thousands of cryptocurrencies, bitcoin mining contribution to the overall consumption of electricity by the cryptocurrency industry is crucial. To understand the alternative cost of maintaining a cryptocurrency industry infrastructure and its impact on the Earth?s ecosystem, different electricity consumption models considered and corresponding carbon footprint model introduced. The carbon footprint model based on a third-party estimate of global electricity consumption by the industry and geographical distribution of mining facilities educated guess coming from the internet traffic distribution of mining pools login pages. This approach allowed considering 8 out of top-10 mining pools responsible for the majority of network hashrate. The resulting carbon dioxide emissions taking bitcoin mining yearly electricity consumption equal 73.12 TWh is 40.88 million tons of CO2, which is 0.12% of global carbon dioxide emissions.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been frequently on media lately. As these cryptocurrencies are relatively new, there are not much economic theory explaining their behavior and price developments. Due to these reasons, the goal of this thesis is to find an economic theory to study the demand for Bitcoin. \n \nIn this thesis, I will write about Bitcoin applying it to Walsh’s Money in Utility function (MIU function). I will modify Walsh’s original model by incorporating Bitcoin to it. In this model, Bitcoin is used as payment method and as a store of value. Both Bitcoin and money can be used to buy any goods, but there are certain goods that are easier to buy using bitcoin. Hence, Bitcoin has transaction benefit and the households will always need some bitcoin holdings in their portfolio. Using Walsh’s MIU function, I will derive a demand function for Bitcoin. \n \nIn addition to this, I will go through the working paper “Bitcoin Pricing, Adoption, and Usage: Theory and Evidence” written by Athey et Al. (August 2016). In this paper, Bitcoin is used both as a payment method and a store of value. From the findings by Athey et Al., Bitcoin seems to be mainly used as a store of value. I will present an overview of the paper including the results and then concentrate on their aggregate analysis on Bitcoin exchange rate. \n \nBased on the Bitcoin exchange rate equation presented by Athey et Al., I will study whether Bitcoin demand function derived from MIU model is able to explain the changes in Bitcoin’s aggregate demand in real market. As expected, due to the assumptions and restrictions of the model, Bitcoin demand function derived in this thesis is not able to fully explain the changes in demand for Bitcoin in real world. Nonetheless, subject to the assumptions and restrictions of the model, Bitcoin demand function can be used to study the relationship between bitcoin demand, domestic nominal interest rate and consumption. Finally, I will present an alternative approach to further study Bitcoin’s demand.
As a neoteric high-tech product, electric vehicles (EVs) can effectively solve the problems of energy shortages and environmental pollution. On the one hand, EV can relieve the peak load of a smart grid and improve the electricity system operation. On the other hand, EV’s electricity trading information can provide useful data for vehicle management departments to electricity scheduling. However, hackers can easily obtain data from the central database to simulate both parties involved, which leads to the receiver getting unauthorized information. For these challenges, we propose a novel secure electricity trading and incentive contract model based on the basic rules of China’s electricity market. The digital signature technology adopts elliptic curve bilinear pairing to guarantee the reliability and integrity of the transaction information. Energy blockchain is utilized for encryption and distributed storage of energy data with the possession of tamper-proof and traceability. The consistency part of the data block applies a practical Byzantine fault-tolerant (PBFT) algorithm, which not only increases transaction throughput but also reduces transmission delay. The incentive contract based on revenue rewards can promote the benign interaction of EVs. The security analysis reveals that this scheme can achieve better results. Compared with other schemes, our scheme saves about 64.55% of the communication overhead and validates the same number of signed messages in a shorter time. Incentive contracts based on game theory can facilitate EV electricity trading through energy coin rewards. This mechanism makes EV more willing and active to participate in transactions that guarantee the activity and stability of the network.
This study applies threshold regression model in a bivariate framework to explore the nonlinear and long-term relationship among daily Bitcoin and gold prices over the period April 2010 to December 2018. Our empirical results are threefold: first, we show that gold is a significant predictor of Bitcoin prices. Second, we find evidence of a non-linear relationship between Bitcoin and gold prices characterized rather by a two-regime relationship with a structural break occurring in October 2017. Third, we explain the existence at before the break, there is statistically significant, negative but weak causality indicating that Bitcoin is a speculative asset. However, after the break, the relationship becomes positive and strong revealing the diversifier and hedge properties of Bitcoin.
Ravi Kishore Kodali, Subbachary Yerroju, Borra Yatish Krishna Yogi
In 21stcentury one of the revolutionary technologies is Blockchain. It can bring regularity ideas to public and private sectors which improve the present management failures. To permit peer-to-peer transactions, Blockchiain maintains continuously growing list of records as a distributive database. In future, the existing conventional energy sources cannot meet the electricity demand. The renewable electricity generation is growing to balance supply and demand and accounts to share in the overall power supply. In the concept of smart cities development, The energy distribution without any intermediaries has a major concern. This emerging blockchain technology provides distributive and decentralized solutions for energy transactions. In this paper, a permissioned blockchain that uses hyperledger fabric to provide a peer-to-peer energy transacting network in order to accommodate the growing volume of renewable energy supply.
New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision is the nation’s leading attempt to realign the business and governance of structures of electrical utilities with the technological attributes of renewable energy resources. Under the traditional, centralized model, low-income households were the recipient of cross-class subsidies which preserved their access to heat and power while stabilizing utility revenues. As distributed energy resources decentralize the electrical system’s physical and governance structures, governments are presented with two general options. The first is energy apartheid, where the mass-affluent defect from the grid and leave low-income households exposed to a financially and physically destabilized grid. The second is energy democracy, where low-income households are allowed access to financing and governance structures which enable them to become owners of distributed energy resources. This chapter considers whether New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision is trending towards energy apartheid or energy democracy.
This study assesses the roles of Bitcoin as a hedge, a safe haven and/or a diversifier against extreme oil price movements, in comparison to the corresponding roles of gold. We use a quantile-on-quantile regression approach to capture the dependence structure between the considered market returns under different Bitcoin market conditions, while considering nuances of oil price movements, compared to gold. Our findings show that both Bitcoin and gold would serve the roles of a hedge, a safe haven and a diversifier for oil price movements. However, this property seems to be sensitive to the Bitcoin's and gold's different (bear, normal or bull) market conditions and to whether the oil price is in a downside, normal or upside regime. By controlling for new and relevant U.S. and global uncertainty indicators, we confirm that both Bitcoin and gold, but not oil, are assets where investors may park their cash during times of political and economic turmoil. The conditional Value-at-Risk (CoVaR) approach to risk management is then conducted, providing robust evidence of the usefulness of each of the Bitcoin and gold in expanded oil portfolios, in terms of diversification opportunities and downside risk reductions.