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.
Generation of renewable energy by participants in the electricity market is used for self-consumption and for local trade. Energy savings can be turned into negative watts-negawatts- and can be traded with peers as the right to purchase electricity. Combining both kilowatt and negawatt trading would enhance the local energy market by providing peers with better access to energy and economic benefits. Trust in the market could be managed effectively with the help of blockchain technology. Market transactions are recorded into immutable, transparent, and distributed ledgers, with added security provided by tokenization. In this work, a combined kiloWatt and negawatts trading is attempted in a local market with solar electricity generation, enabled by smart contract deployed on public blockchain. Smart contracts are written in Solidity language and deployed on Sepolia test network for Ethereum public blockchain.
The government made a quick decision by providing subsidies for domestic sales of electric vehicles with a fairly large nominal value because, in the last 20 years, Indonesia has become one of the largest producers of carbon emissions in the world, which has an impact on climate change and global warming. This study aims to analyze ways to optimize and update current subsidy distribution to make it more effective and keep it on target for all beneficiaries. We use the case study analysis method in several frameworks related to the previous subsidy distribution mechanism and identify problems in the current framework by integrating blockchain technology. The result is a proposed distribution system framework with a digital marketplace designed specifically for subsidies for government monitoring. We try to involve third parties as payment gateways for rupiah currency transactions, not ethereum digital currency. Our traceability feature utilizes blockchain traceability for program audit traceability.
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.
The remarkable success of deep learning (DL) in predicting battery health has prompted interest in its application in recent years. While state-of-the-art DL models have achieved high accuracy in battery health prediction, they have not been widely adopted in industrial workflows, primarily due to their lack of interpretability and security. To address this issue, we propose a blockchain-based interpretable prediction algorithm for battery health prediction in electric vehicles (EVs) within the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Specifically, the proposed method includes a platform architecture for a blockchain-based DL system, ensuring secure storage of user data during the prediction process. Notably, we develop a novel battery life prediction algorithm called BLP-Transformer, which leverages short-term relationships between degraded data and explains the impact of feature extraction on predicted results through the contribution of aggregated features based on a feature focusing mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that the system is feasible for security and can provide accurate battery life prediction. In addition, the comparison study further highlights the superiority of the proposed algorithm in terms of robustness, prediction accuracy, and model interpretability.
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>
Raising ambition inside the Paris Agreement calls for collaboration on climate action. Efficient a nd trustworthy monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is important in decarbonization efforts. This article proposes a collaborative approach, and exemplifies two scenarios in MRV. Therefore, we propose a consortium blockchain as platform, and aim on the reduction of costs and efforts by collaboration and automation of different aspects in GHG management. We present a demonstrator with Hyperledger Fabric, which employs a industry grade RFID security approach to distribute and manage certificate material, a low-code interface to interact with the network, and the operation of Fabric nodes on industrial edge devices. We argue that a toolkit approach like CarbonEdge may be a step towards ease of use for blockchain based GHG emissions management.
In many regions of the world, energy attribute certificates (EACs) are created, stored and traded by means of centralized registries. These systems, which are often accused of being used for “greenwashing”, are usually country-specific and pose prohibitive administrative and economic barriers for small energy producers or prosumers. Blockchain-based approaches are widely considered an open, decentralized, transparent and more granular alternative. One of the technically mature solutions is Energy Web Origin. While this platform implements the concept of electricity generation devices, it does not provide any means of tying the use of an EAC to a point of consumption, such as a smart meter, a data center, or an industrial facility. To mitigate this limitation, we propose an extension of the Energy Web Origin system by an architecture that utilizes a consumption token based on the Ethereum ERC-721 standard. We assess the technical feasibility and scalability by measuring the amount of computing power (“gas”) required to run this extension on the Energy Web Chain.
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.