Love it or loathe it, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are here to stay. Yet do you know how crypto is "manufactured"? It turns out to be a very noisy operation! Hundreds, if not thousands of powerful computer servers and processors are needed to solve the vexing Bitcoin mining algorithms. And those computers generate heat, a lot of heat (!), that must be cooled and ventilated, thus creating noise. This paper will describe the noise assessment and control efforts performed on a major Bitcoin mining operation in Tennessee. Megawatts of power are needed to support the operations, and the ventilation noise was causing significant community complaints that threatened to shut down the mining operation. Fortunately, application of some traditional and custom-made noise mitigation measures solved the noise problem and allowed the mining operation to proceed around the clock. At the time of writing this abstract, 1 Bitcoin = $46,500.
Oussama Laayati, Hicham El Hadraoui, Mostafa Bouzi, Ali El-Alaoui · 6 authors
Smart energy management systems have shown lately efficient solutions to optimize the energy consumption, maximize the energy productions, predict the demand response, and grid self-diagnosis. These systems give insights on energy behaviour within the electrical power grid, where the consumers and producers can have real-time key performance indicators related to the energy that help them to take decisions in order to optimize their consumption. The management of loads and sources is a critical component of the mentioned systems especially when it comes to decentralized energy production within the grid, which create a huge energy market, where prosumers can buy and sell green energy interfacing with a certified agency that approve these transactions. The goal of this paper is to de-sign a blockchain base energy management system which enable a peer-to-peer energy market, the key element of this design is the power meters and their inter-actions with the electrical grid not only as measurement devices but also as digital wallet, that enable the prosumers to sell and buy energy. This concept integrates all blockchain components including cybersecurity, bidding techniques and welfare optimization. A simulation of these optimization techniques, hashing algorithms and their interactions with the smart meters to generate smart contracts and to increase security according to the blockchain concept were proposed.
Mehran Hajiaghapour‐Moghimi, Kamyar Azimi Hosseini, Ehsan Hajipour, Mehdi Vakilian
By privatization and deregulation, distribution transformers have gradually been pushed further into their operating limits. Under these circumstances, in countries with cheap or subsidized electricity price, the introduction of profitable cryptocurrencies application is deeply penetrated. It has attracted many low-voltage customers to mine these digital currencies individually or in mining pools. The employed mining devices with their own unique constant load profile have escalated the coincident factor of the loads supplied by a transformer. This can highly overload the transformers engaged with loads of this type and, in the long term will cause destructive impacts not only on the transformer also on the distribution facilities. This paper studies the adverse effect of cryptocurrency mining loads on the distribution transformer aging. At first, the customer's profit analysis through mining operation has been introduced, realizing different electric energy pricing strategies. Finally, 105 real-world distribution substations have been monitored over one year, and their actual load profiles data are recorded for analysis. A relation between the penetration rate of the mining devices and the transformer's expected lifetime is determined in this work. It is shown that the distribution transformers' expected lifetime will decrease by 25% in the presence of only a 5% penetration rate of cryptocurrency miners. This is an alarming statistic for distribution networks operating under the presence of cryptocurrency mining loads. This should be strictly addressed in the future planning of these distribution networks.
As the backbone of the smart grid, smart metering systems enable customers, as well as utility companies, to have access to real-time information on consumption patterns in electricity, gas, and water. From a technical standpoint, smart metering systems (1) reduce the need to verify electricity, gas, and water consumption services, (2) allow for efficient management of electricity, gas, and water consumption patterns, and (3) protect natural resources. Additionally, smart metering systems provide a number of important functions that should be performed manually, such as automatic and remote measurement of electricity, gas, and water consumption, connect or disconnect service, tampering detection, outage identification and isolation, and collecting, aggregating, and analyzing real-time information of the fundamental parameters associated with customers’ services, i.e., voltage, current, etc. Besides, considering the number of customers, there are several limitations to accessing and sharing the data between utility companies and customers, and therefore, reliable and secure communication infrastructure is needed. To resolve such issues, a conceptual and technological Blockchain-based system is developed to securely share the real-time collected data from a set of various sensors for monitoring and control of electricity, gas, and water consumption, namely the multifunctional integrated smart metering system. The proposed system takes advantage of a decentralized structure, connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT) nodes, data privacy, and transparency and auditability. The proposed Blockchain-based smart metering system allows customers to securely monitor their actual electricity, gas, and water consumption for a specific period of time and review the full history of consumption. This leads to finding solutions to rationalize the consumption of electricity, gas, and water resources.
Cryptocurrency blockchain data encounter a class-imbalance problem due to only a few known labels of illicit or fraudulent activities in the blockchain network. For this purpose, we seek to compare various resampling methods applied to two highly imbalanced datasets derived from the blockchain of Bitcoin and Ethereum after further dimensionality reductions, which is different from previous studies on these datasets. Firstly, we study the performance of various classical supervised learning methods to classify illicit transactions or accounts on Bitcoin or Ethereum datasets, respectively. Consequently, we apply various resampling techniques to these datasets using the best performing learning algorithm on each of these datasets. Subsequently, we study the feature importance of the given models, wherein the resampled datasets directly influenced on the explainability of the model. Our main finding is that undersampling using the edited nearest-neighbour technique has attained an accuracy of more than 99% on the given datasets by removing the noisy data points from the whole dataset. Moreover, the best-performing learning algorithms have shown superior performance after feature reduction on these datasets in comparison to their original studies. The matchless contribution lies in discussing the effect of the data resampling on feature importance which is interconnected with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques.
Smart grids are evolving towards intelligent electricity grid where the operation of systems is distributed and automatised. Technical solutions to achieve these future needs are proposed using blockchain with smart contracts in many studies, where smart contracts enhance automation. Fundamentally smart contracts will increase security because of their distributed nature and since it inherits the security of blockchain. However, smart contracts are software components, which have special features like the unstoppable nature of applications and may use special languages like Solidity. Our aim in this paper is to get a holistic review in the smart contract life cycle, what potential new vulnerabilities and threats will they introduce and how can they be prevented, and what smart contract specific issues programmers should focus on. We also propose a future direction to achieve more secure smart contracts in smart energy systems.
Md. Rafiqul Islam, Muhammad Mahbubur Rahman, Mohammed Ataur Rahman, Muslim Har Sani Mohamad · 5 authors
The alternative energy generation sources have increased drastically from centralized systems to distributed systems which increases the stability of energy distribution management systems and reduces the distribution cost as well. On the other hand, it reduces the probability of major area electricity blackout chances and decreases the energy distribution loss. For proper distribution and management of energy, there are different types of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT) available, but a blockchain automated system is one of the best choices and is highly recommended. Various aspects of blockchain technology and energy management system have been discussed in this review paper where a total number of 423 journal papers, articles, and online information sources have been reviewed in the initial stage, and finally, 63 published research articles have been selected for review. There are several topics, including technology overview in energy management systems, blockchain application of energy trading, blockchain technology implementation challenges, distributed energy management system with Ethereum, and a conclusion with some recommendations have been discussed. Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) are highly transparent, authenticate, and secure systems that can be used for distributing the energy between distributor and consumer without an intermediator which increases the overall efficiency of the system. This paper aims to highlight the blockchain and distributed ledger technology and how it works as well as optimize the transaction processing cost among the participants of the consortium network. This paper will make a significant contribution to the new research work and in the field of energy management systems.
Much has changed in the power industry since the inception of commercial electrical power systems. What has not changed is the cycle of disruption and adaptation empowered by innovation. The next disruption is on the horizon and is fueled by the push to decarbonize the grid. In this article, I argue that the next disruption will be shaped by three technologies: artificial intelligence (AI), 5G networks, and distributed digital ledger (DDL). Even though historical elements in this article are drawn from the evolution of the power industry in the United States, parallels can be found elsewhere.
The digitalization of the power grid and advancement in intelligent technologies have enabled the service provider to convert the existing electrical grid into a smart grid. The transformation of the grid will help in integrating cleaner energy technologies with energy management to improve power network efficiency. Internet of things (IoT) and various network components need to be deployed to harness the full potential of the smart grid. Also, integrating intermittent renewable energy sources, energy storage, intelligent control of selected power-intensive loads, etc will improve energy efficiency. But deployment of this information and communication technologies will make the grid more vulnerable to cyber attacks from hackers. In this work, blockchain-based self-sovereign identification and authentication technique is presented to avert identity theft and masquerading. The proposed approach can minimize the chances of identity-based security breaches in the smart grid. This paper provides an overview of the model of identification and authentication of IoT devices in Smart Grid based on Blockchain technology. The Blockchain based implementation of identification and authentication of devices is proposed to validate the model in the distributed electrical energy network. The model is able to authenticate the device using Blockchain in a trusted model. The system works according to plan validating the authenticity of transaction in a node in log(n) time, which justifies presented result.
In recent years, blockchain technology has been developing rapidly. More and more traditional industries are using blockchain as a platform for information storage and financial transactions, mainly because of its new characteristics of non-tamperability and decentralization compared with the traditional systems. As a representative of blockchain 2.0, Ethereum has gained popularity upon its introduction. However, because of the anonymity of blockchain, Ethereum has also attracted the attention of some unscrupulous people. Currently, millions of contracts are deployed on Ethereum, many of which are fraudulent contracts deployed by unscrupulous people for profit, and these contracts are causing huge losses to investors worldwide. Ponzi contracts are typical of these contracts, which mainly reward the funds invested by later investors to early investors, and later investors will have no gain. However, although there are some studies for identifying Ponzi contracts on Ethereum, there is some room for progress in the research. Therefore, we propose a method to detect Ponzi scheme contracts on Ethereum-CTRF. This method forms a dataset by extracting the word features and sequence features of the smart contract’s code and the features of transactions. The dataset is divided into a training set and a test set. Oversampling is performed on the training set to deal with the problem of positive and negative sample imbalance. Finally, the model is trained on the training set and tested on the test set. The experimental results show that the model has significantly improved recall compared with existing Ponzi contract detection methods.
As we all know, the behavior of stealing electric energy governance is always the difficulty and key point in the management of electric power enterprises. In recent years, as bitcoin’s value continued to climb, the theft of electricity by bitcoin mining user began to appear. In order to solve the power theft problem of bitcoin mining users, we conducted an in-depth study on the power consumption behavior of such users based on the power data analysis technology. This paper analyzes the power consumption characteristics of bitcoin mining users and uses electric data acquire system to monitor power consumption behavior. The paper makes comparative analysis on the massive data such as voltage and power of the electric energy acquisition system, analyzes and calculates the Pearson correlation coefficient between the electricity consumption of each customer and the line loss statistics of the power station by using Pearson correlation algorithm combined with the power loss of the power station, and analyzes the suspected users of stealing electric energy by taking an actual example. Through our research, we found a total of 16 bitcoin miners suspected of stealing electricity. After on-site investigation and evidence collection, we found that 10 of the users did have abnormal power consumption, and the accuracy rate reached 62.50%. Therefore, the economic benefits of this research are very significant.
Information is one of the essential assets in any business. Due to the rapid technological changes, maintaining and protecting the information of individuals and organizations has become more imperative. Blockchain is a sequence of blocks that store information as a hashed value chained together as a ledger of records. This paper proposes a blockchain-based solution to manage water and electricity services. The solution keeps track of water and electricity consumption by consumers, allows them to view and pay bills, and secures their online transactions. It functions as a shared ledger between Abu Dhabi Distribution Company, Bin Moosa & Daly water and electricity supplement store, and Fazaa discount card. In addition, the proposed solution offers transparency and full trust between the different entities, controls the blockchain network, and validates transactions. Finally, the proposed application supports the UAE sustainability initiative by reducing paper usage.
The cybersecurity threats in the smart grid network are prominent with conventional approaches providing integrated security control and communication protection for smart grids that are vulnerable to some types of attacks and limit their use in real-time applications. In this study, the statistical function predicts the system performance of the future timestamp and compares it with the actual performance to detect the attack. The asymmetric encryption function is used to find the user authentication, which is complex and increases the network latency. In this paper, a blockchain-based methodology is proposed for cybersecurity threat detection in smart grid networks without increasing the network latency. The proposed model is based on blockchain-based secure user authentication, lightweight data encryption and quantum key distribution multi-constraint-based edge selection, bi-fold intrusion detection system, and optimal user privacy management. The results show that the accuracy of the proposed model is 98%.
The transformation of the global energy system must be accelerated to reach the 2015 Paris Agreement's goal of limiting the rise in average global temperatures to far below 2°C, ideally 1.5°C, by the end of the century relative to pre-industrial levels. Renewable electricity supply can materially contribute to the worldwide emission reductions needed in the energy sector. Therefore, renewable electricity funding needs to be scaled up significantly and urgently to advance the energy transformation. However, the core revenue risks associated with these assets, including financing, volume, and price risks, make it challenging for them to attract finance at favorable rates and advantageous terms from traditionally risk-averse investors. A number of traditional techniques have been employed to hedge these risks but these have many limitations including operational inefficiencies, redundancy of and dependency on many intermediaries, amongst others. Decentralized applications, combining blockchain and smart contracts, have recently been mooted in the financial industry to address similar challenges but in different contexts. On this basis, this study, for the first time, explores the potential of using blockchain smart contracts to address the limitations of traditional renewable electricity financing and hedging applications. This thesis evolves from conceptualization to application, using the financing and operating risks of renewable generators as case studies. First, a financing framework for blockchain smart contracts is structured to determine if such novel arrangements outperform traditional instruments for asset finance. Next, new smart contract hedging arrangements are developed and analytically valued for blockchain deployment through a use case for minimizing volume risk. Thereafter, smart contract hedging instruments are deployed on a blockchain network using an arrangement for minimizing price risk. Results from these case studies indicate that blockchain smart contracts could be effective in overcoming the limitations and hedging the underlying risk exposures of existing arrangements but present their own risks that need to be better assessed and understood before they can become mainstream in the industry. These newly introduced threats motivate the final part of this work which is the development of a taxonomy of the risks and challenges of embracing blockchain smart contracts in facilitating renewable electricity transactions. Results here indicate that cooperation and partnerships between developers and researchers, renewable energy companies, and governments are required to better understand blockchain smart contract risks in the sector. Overall, compared to traditional arrangements that have been in existence for more than two decades, blockchain smart contracts are only burgeoning and have a chance to address their associated risks and enable the renewable energy sector to develop further.
Mohammad Kamrul Hasan, Ali Alkhalifah, Shayla Islam, Nissrein Babiker Mohammed Babiker · 7 authors
The smart grid idea was implemented as a modern interpretation of the traditional power grid to find out the most efficient way to combine renewable energy and storage technologies. Throughout this way, big data and the Internet always provide a revolutionary solution for ensuring that electrical energy linked intelligent grid, also known as the energy Internet. The blockchain has some significant features, making it an applicable technology for smart grid standards to solve the security issues and trust challenges. This study will present a rigorous review of blockchain implementations with the cyber security perception and energy data protections in smart grids. As a result, we describe the major security issues of smart grid scenarios that big data and blockchain can solve. Then, we identify a variety of recent blockchain‐based research works published in various literature and discuss security concerns on smart grid systems. We also discuss numerous similar practical designs, experiments, and items that have recently been developed. Finally, we go through some of the most important research problems and possible directions for using blockchain to address smart grid security concerns.
Mehran Hajiaghapour‐Moghimi, Kamyar Azimi Hosseini, Ehsan Hajipour, Mehdi Vakilian
Cryptocurrency mining device (CMD) is a plug-and-play device installed by any low-voltage customer to convert electrical energy to digital money. Recently, the significant increase in the price of digital currencies has persuaded residential customers in many countries to employ CMDs to obtain quick and easy profit. However, these rapidly evolving loads can cause a substantial increase in the coincident peak load of distribution networks. Therefore, it can threaten the safe and reliable operation of the network. A straightforward way to restrict the penetration rate of these home-based miners is to increase the electricity price such that this business becomes unprofitable; however, this solution affects the national regulations and is not practical in many countries. This paper proposes a practical electricity pricing strategy to manage the operation of cryptocurrency mining loads appropriately. This pricing strategy can change the miner’ threat to an opportunity to sell more electrical energy during the off-peak hours to these loads and to maximize the profit of the utility. The proposed strategy is studied using the load profile dataset obtained from the measurements of Tehran Electricity Distribution Company, and its effectiveness is demonstrated.
Dipanjan Bose, Chandan Kumar Chanda, A. Chakrabarti
Abstract The resilience of the power grid is taking a vital role in the energy supply and distribution process. But due to the rapid growth of integration of renewable distributed energy sources to the traditional power grid, the nature of the trading system is shifted from the centralized to decentralized or distributed manner. Blockchain is one of the most emerging security technologies that change the dimension of the financial and energy sector with openness and complete freedom. Blockchain implemented distributed energy trading promotes decentralized electricity markets. The physical system consists of the planning of the routing of energy from one place to another. A user can not send power to another customer in any severe outage or natural disaster in a traditional system. The user cannot participate in the trade globally. So in this proposed methodology, the connections of each customer to the central grid through several microgrids have been shown. In this work, an innovative approach in trading and finding a solution to a payment method is proposed. Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts completed the entire trading system in automation mode in our proposed system. Any power outage at one place can be compensated by routing a new path of energy inflow from another active source, which enhances the system’s resiliency to a certain degree. While trading, no third parties will be engaged so that the transaction is efficient and fast.
Electricity theft has been a growing concern for the smart grid. It can be defined as follows: illegal customers use energy from electric utilities without a contract or manipulate their meter readings to pay less or not pay the electricity bill. Over the past decade, significant studies have been done to prevent and combat theft. This article aims to provide a general overview of the progress of electricity theft detection, including threat models, datasets and input features adopted, methodologies and techniques, and evaluation metrics. We also make a performance comparison for each detection method. Finally, the challenges and future research directions are presented in this article.
Wei Wu, Hongjie He, Zhenyue Chu, Yi Liu · 9 authors
Nowadays, the construction of smart grids and new digital infrastructure is vigorously promoted by the government, so that the power infrastructure is gradually developing towards intelligence and digitization. However, various challenges such as the industry barrier difficult to remove, the unclear supervision policy, and unmatured technology specifications are brought into the present infrastructure construction. In order to improve the timeliness and accuracy of the power infrastructure fund payment, increase the credibility of data, and enhance the quality and effectiveness of supervision and review, a blockchain-based smart payment scheme for power infrastructure is proposed in this work. First, a smart payment business framework of power infrastructure based on blockchain technology is designed. On this basis, the overall framework of the smart payment scheme and the relationships between participants of the blockchain are analyzed. Then, the smart contract for power infrastructure fund payment based on Remix IDE is customized and the correctness and efficiency of the scheme are verified. Finally, the effectiveness and advantages of the scheme are analyzed from the perspective of reliability, security, and efficiency. The simulation result shows that the smart contract based payment process of power infrastructure funds can be optimized and simplified by the proposed scheme and the overall processing time can be reduced by more than 30%.