There are a growing number of blockchain applications in energy systems, but surprisingly little is known about their direct energy demand outside of cryptocurrency applications. Addressing this knowledge gap should be a key policy priority so that the energy use of blockchain systems can be better understood and managed as applications proliferate. To help policy makers and energy analysts achieve this goal, this article makes three contributions. First, we present a brief review of blockchain system components, energy demand drivers, and emerging applications to provide a common conceptual foundation. Second, we propose best practices for energy analysis of blockchain systems and identify best practice lapses in previous literature that presently cloud our understanding of energy use. Finally, we propose priority research areas to address identified lapses and knowledge gaps, which would ensure future research produces data and estimates that are maximally relevant to energy policy decisions.
Under the Energy Efficiency Directive (2012/27/EU) energy companies have to achieve yearly energy savings up to 1.5% of annual sales to final consumers. Although buildings’ occupants and energy end-users seem to be gaining greater awareness of the value and need for sustainable energy practices, they do not behave in a more energy-conscious way. Existing solutions tend to be complicated, excluding buildings’ occupants from the process of understanding how the building works in terms of energy efficiency. This study presents a suite of user-centered applications, which will empower energy end-users to engage in achieving energy efficiency, using an open, secure, privacy-respectful, configurable, scalable cloud based big data infrastructure. This multi-disciplinary big data environment will integrate heterogeneous types of data, combined with emerging machine learning algorithms, distributed ledgers, blockchain technologies and a digital reward scheme through an alternative currency. These tools provide a “user – centric” framework for energy companies, local and regional authorities and third parties to empower energy end-users to take an active attitude in their energy usage. The proposed framework aims at transforming the social environment in a building to make people aware of the value of energy, and the importance of their collaboration, unlocking a potential for 12TWh energy saved in Europe.
Green Internet of things (GIoT) generally refers to a new generation of Internet of things design concept. It can save energy and reduce emissions, reduce environmental pollution, waste of resources, and harm to human body and environment, in which green smart device (GSD) is a basic unit of GIoT for saving energy. With the access of a large number of heterogeneous bottom-layer GSDs in GIoT, user access and control of GSDs have become more and more complicated. Since there is no unified GSD management system, users need to operate different GIoT applications and access different GIoT cloud platforms when accessing and controlling these heterogeneous GSDs. This fragmented GSD management model not only increases the complexity of user access and control for heterogeneous GSDs, but also reduces the scalability of GSDs applications. To address this issue, this article presents a blockchain-empowered general GSD access control framework, which provides users with a unified GSD management platform. First, based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) decentralized identifiers (DIDs) standard, users and GSD are issued visual identity ( VID ). Then, we extended the GSD-DIDs protocol to authenticate devices and users. Finally, based on the characteristics of decentralization and non-tampering of blockchain, a unified access control system for GSD was designed, including the registration, granting, and revoking of access rights. We implement and test on the Raspberry Pi device and the FISCO-BCOS alliance chain. The experimental results prove that the framework provides a unified and feasible way for users to achieve decentralized, lightweight, and fine-grained access control of GSDs. The solution reduces the complexity of accessing and controlling GSDs, enhances the scalability of GSD applications, as well as guarantees the credibility and immutability of permission data and identity data during access.
With the development of the Energy Internet and the support of the subsidy policies of various countries, Electric Vehicles(EVs) have ushered in a golden development period. However, the development of EVs needs to solve the problems of insufficient charging piles(CPs) and difficulty in finding CPs. In order to solve the problem of difficult charging of EVs, the concept of shared charging came into being, in which idle CPs or private CPs are shared to meet the charging needs of more people and improve the utilization rate of CPs. However, the shared charging scheme implemented by third-party platforms faces the issue of trust lacking. This paper proposes a blockchain architecture for shared charging, which can use the blockchain to build a trust environment involving private pile owners, charging pile(CP) operators, Electric Vehicle(EV) users, etc.. The blockchain architecture also contains the block structure where pointer was added for quick search, contract content that can automatically execute multi-party contracts to achieve secure computing and reputation-based incentive mechanism to provide high-quality charging services in detail. This architecture establishes the multi-party trust environment for shared charging from three aspects: secure storage, secure computing, and secure incentives.
Tarek AlSkaif, Jose L. Crespo-Vazquez, Milos Sekuloski, Gijs van Leeuwen · 5 authors
This paper proposes two novel strategies for determining the bilateral trading preferences of households participating in a fully Peer-to-Peer (P2P) local energy market. The first strategy matches between surplus power supply and demand of participants, while the second is based on the distance between them in the network. The impact of bilateral trading preferences on the price and amount of energy traded is assessed for the two strategies. A decentralized fully P2P energy trading market is developed to generate the results in a day-ahead setting. After that, a permissioned blockchain-smart contract platform is used for the implementation of the decentralized P2P trading market on a digital platform. Actual data from a residential neighborhood in the Netherlands, with different varieties of distributed energy resources, is used for the simulations. Results show that in the two strategies, the energy procurement cost and grid interaction of all participants in P2P trading are reduced compared to a baseline scenario. The total amount of P2P energy traded is found to be higher when the trading preferences are based on distance, which could also be considered as a proxy for energy efficiency in the network by encouraging P2P trading among nearby households. However, the P2P trading prices in this strategy are found to be lower. Further, a comparison is made between two scenarios: with and without electric heating in households. Although the electrification of heating reduces the total amount of P2P energy trading, its impact on the trading prices is found to be limited.
Andrea Pinna, Gavina Baralla, Michele Marchesi, Roberto Tonelli
This paper presents a first investigation to join agile blockchain-oriented software development principles with sustainability software design principles. The development of blockchain-oriented software should always be performed in the awareness of the potential effects generated from its use, especially in a long-term life cycle perspective. In other terms in the awareness of its present and future sustainability. By using the principles of sustainability software design and recognized the role of blockchain-oriented Agile methodologies to manage changes in technology and requirements, we present a new Agile method for the development of blockchain-oriented systems that includes sustainability awareness practices within the development phases, in particular in the requirements and the acceptance tests. This allows to deal with blockchain-oriented systems sustainability immediately and during the incremental and iterative development process. The paper describes the process in its phases and provides an example of an application to the supply chain sector.
In recent years, blockchain has grown in popularity due to its singular attributes, enabling the development of new innovative decentralized applications. But when companies consider leveraging blockchain for their applications, the plethora of possible choices and the difficulty of integrating blockchain into architectures can hinder its adoption. Our research project aims to ease the adoption of blockchain into companies, notably with the construction of an automated decision process to solve this issue in which requirements are first-class citizens, a knowledge base containing architectural patterns and blockchains refined over time, and an architecture generator able to process outputs into architectural stubs. This paper will also present our current progression on this decision process, by introducing the preliminary version that is able to choose the most suitable blockchain between multiple choices and our process-driven benchmarking tool.
The popularity of smartphones has led to the growth of mobile app markets, creating a need for enhanced transparency, global access, and secure downloading. This paper introduces AGChain, a blockchain-based gateway that enables trustworthy app delegation within existing markets. AGChain ensures that markets can continue providing services while users benefit from permanent, distributed, and secure app delegation. During its development, we address two key challenges: significantly reducing smart contract gas costs and enabling fully distributed IPFS-based file storage. Additionally, we tackle three system issues related to security and sustainability. We have implemented a prototype of AGChain on Ethereum and Polygon blockchains, achieving effective security and decentralization with a minimal gas cost of around 0.002 USD per app upload (no cost for app download). The system also exhibits reasonable performance with an average overhead of 12%.
João Akio Ribeiro Yamaguchi, Teresa Rachael Santos, A. P. de Carvalho
Several renewable energy certificate (RECs) applications point out that the blockchain technology can be useful in ensuring the traceability and transparency of transactions, despite some barriers to its implementation, such as the legal and market development. However, it is not clear how the organizational positioning, in relation to its given market, influences the artifact developed. In this study, through design science research (DSR) and case study methodology, we structure the problem space of two different positioned organizations in the sustainability field, with blockchain-based applications to produce and trade RECs. We find out that: (a) the position of the organization in relation to other stakeholders changes the behavior of the technology adoption; (b) the technological solution preceded the perception of the problem; (c) organizations create different representations of the artifact for each stakeholder. We suggest other studies to deepen these findings in order to better develop theories that explain how organizations see their problem when developing technological solutions while using DSR.
As cryptocurrencies are becoming more and more widespread and their power consumption has caught the attention of the public, it seems worthwhile to investigate their effects on the environment, economy and society. In the scientific literature, a clear focus on the high power consumption of the market-dominating Bitcoin can be seen in the sustainability assessment of cryptocurrencies. In order to build a comprehensive understanding of cryptocurrencies’ sustainability other aspects should be considered as well instead of narrowing down the scope of analysis to power consumption. Therefore, a holistic definition of sustainability in the context of cryptocurrencies is proposed. Building upon this definition a methodology for assessing a cryptocurrencies’ sustainability is derived in this paper and subsequently applied to ten cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain is an emerging technology that is increasingly being applied in both industrial and academic contexts. Cryptocurrency is a major application of blockchain in the financial sector, but the technology is expected to disrupt other industries. In fact, it has influenced many businesses and reshaped private and public sector activities. Therefore, there is growing interest in blockchain-based solutions, and applications have evolved in finance, insurance, logistics, government, education, and healthcare. Applications built on blockchains benefit from fair access, transparency, and immutability; these properties have attracted business owners and practitioners to explore blockchain opportunities beyond cryptocurrency, motivating them to investigate how they can benefit from the technology and also to evaluate its compatibility with their strategic orientation. Suitability evaluation (or applicability evaluation) has always been a crucial step for the successful adaptation of any innovative technology, including blockchain. Hence, this paper investigates how the current literature has addressed blockchain suitability evaluation for business cases beyond cryptocurrency. A scoping review is presented that examines the evaluation models and frameworks that have been developed to assist decision-makers regarding blockchain adoption. The results indicate that blockchain evaluation methodologies have utilized varied approaches and serve diverse objectives, which are applicable for different technology adoption stages. Through this scoping review, blockchain evaluation initiatives are classified into five categories, and a critical analysis is offered of the evaluation models under each category. As such, this scoping review overviews existing methodologies for blockchain evaluation approaches with a focus on context, identified assessments factors, assessment process, and evaluation dimensions.
We investigate the operational and coordinated strategies of a low carbon supply chain in the carbon limit and exchange market, where the capital-constrained manufacturer exhibits loss-reluctance behavior due to the uncertainty of market demand. In this paper, we calculate the greatest loan interest rate for the electronic business platform, the greatest ordering amount for the manufacturer in the decentralized system, and the greatest ordering amount for the entire supply chain in the centralized system. We design a transfer payment contract to coordinate the emission-dependent supply under the electronic business platform financing service by comparing the manufacturer's greatest ordering amount in different systems. We conclude from theoretical analyses that when the critical value of the manufacturer's self-owned capital exceeds a certain point, the greatest ordering amount of the loss-reluctance manufacturer under the electronic business platform financing service is greater than that of the well-funded manufacturer. Furthermore, when the manufacturer's self-owned capital changes within a certain range, the electronic business platform financing service can cause both an electronic business platform and a loss-reluctant manufacturer to achieve Pareto improvement, even though the electronic business platform financing service does not coordinate the supply chain, which is regulated by a carbon limit and an exchange mechanism. Furthermore, when a certain condition is met by the transfer payment contract, the lack of capital and the low carbon supply chain can achieve complete coordination.
Juri Mattila, Timo Seppälä, Pellervo Valkama, Taneli Hukkinen · 6 authors
Collecting and utilizing product life-cycle data is both difficult and expensive for products that move between different industrial settings at various points of the product life-cycle. Product-centric approaches that present effective solutions in tightly integrated environments have been problematic to deploy across multiple industries and over longer timespans. Addressing deployment costs, incentives, and governance, this paper explores a blockchain-based approach for the deployment of product-centric information systems. Through explorative design science and systematic combining, the deployment of a permissionless blockchain system for collecting product life-cycle data is conceptualized, demonstrated, and evaluated by experts. The purpose of the blockchain-based solution is to manage product data interactions, to maintain an accurate single state of product information, and to provide an economic incentive structure for the provision and the deployment of the solution. The evaluation by knowledgeable researchers and practitioners identifies the aspects limiting blockchain-based deployment of solutions in the current industrial landscape. Combining theory and practice, the paper lays the foundation for a blockchain-based approach to product information management, placing design priority on inter-industrial and self-sustained deployment.
Saša Malešević, Michael Lustenberger, Florian Spychiger
Improving current supply chains by using distributed ledger technology (DLT) has been a highly researched topic during the last years. Currently, there are numerous articles elaborating on how such technologies can theoretically improve supply chains. However, case studies of such concepts and their economic value are scarce. In order to bridge this gap, we collaborated with a regional label company to clarify how a distributed ledger technology would benefit their ecosystem. This work answers the question of how such a prototype would look and whether it adds value. By following design science research practices, we design two artifacts based on requirements gathered in 14 interviews and discuss the artifacts’ elements within an evaluation panel. Our findings show that a distributed ledger application for the regional label ecosystem should have an open and decentralized architecture giving all participants full access to the shared data while still providing security and privacy for sensitive data. Additionally, data capturing should be simple. However, such an application does not add sufficient economic value and is currently of no practical interest in the regional label ecosystem as the expenditure likely exceeds the benefit.
Marco Schletz, Ana Cristina Cardoso, Gabriela Prata Dias, Søren Salomo
This paper qualitatively evaluates the application of blockchain technology for three energy efficiency use cases. To achieve the Sustainable Development Agenda, energy efficiency improvements have to double by 2030. However, the adoption of energy efficiency interventions is slow due to several market barriers. Blockchain technology is a nascent technology with the potential to address these barriers or even fundamentally change energy system designs, by enabling transparent, decentralised, and tamper-resilient systems. Nevertheless, a blockchain application comes with trade-offs and needs to be considered on a case by case basis. In this paper, we examine the benefits and constraints of a blockchain application for three different approaches to achieving energy efficiency: (i) peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading; (ii) White Certificate Scheme (WCS); and (iii) Energy Service Companies (ESCOs). For each of these cases, we apply a decision framework to assess blockchain feasibility and outline a potential blockchain-based design. The analysis shows that blockchain functions are case dependent and that an application creates different governance and system designs due to varying case characteristics. We discuss how the identified blockchain adoption barriers can be overcome and stress the need for policy action to advance the development of pilot studies. By decentralising system governance, blockchain enables innovative designs that can accelerate the implementation of energy efficiency interventions.
Nowadays, the adoption of demand response programs is still lagging due to the prosumers' lack of awareness, fear of losing control and privacy of energy data, etc. Programs decentralization, by adopting promising technologies such as blockchain, may bring significant advantages in terms of transparency, openness, improved control, and increased active participation of prosumers. Nevertheless, even though in general the transparency of the public blockchain is a desirable feature in the energy domain, the prosumer energy data is sensitive and rather private, thus, a privacy-preserving solution is required. In this paper, we present a decentralized implementation of demand response programs on top of the public blockchain which deals with the privacy of the prosumer's energy data using zero-knowledge proofs and validates on the blockchain the prosumer's activity inside the program using smart contracts. Prosumer energy data is kept private, while on the blockchain it is stored a zero-knowledge proof that is generated by the prosumer itself allowing the implementation of functions to validate potential deviations from the request and settle prosumer's activity. The solution evaluation results are promising in terms of ensuring the privacy of prosumer energy data stored in the public blockchain and detecting potential data inconsistencies.
Lu Hou, Kan Zheng, Zhiming Liu, Xiaojun Xu · 5 authors
Efficiency and security have become critical issues during the development of the long-range (LoRa) system for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. The centralized work method in the LoRa system, where all packages are processed and kept in the central cloud, cannot well exploit the resources in LoRa gateways and also makes it vulnerable to security risks, such as data falsification or data loss. On the other hand, the blockchain has the potential to provide a decentralized and secure infrastructure for the LoRa system. However, there are significant challenges in deploying blockchain at LoRa gateways with limited edge computing abilities. This article proposes a design and implementation of the blockchain-enabled LoRa system with edge computing by using the open-source Hyperledger Fabric, which is called as HyperLoRa. According to different features of LoRa data, a blockchain network with multiple ledgers is designed, each of which stores a specific kind of LoRa data. LoRa gateways can participate in the operations of the blockchain and share the ledger that keep the time-critical network data with small size. Then, the edge computing abilities of LoRa gateways are utilized to handle the join procedure and application packages processing. Furthermore, a HyperLoRa prototype is implemented on embedded hardware, which demonstrates the feasibility of deploying the blockchain into LoRa gateways with limited computing and storage resources. Finally, various experiments are conducted to evaluate the performances of the proposed LoRa system.
Junghoon Woo, Charles J. Kibert, Richard E. Newman, Alireza Shojaei Kol Kachi · 6 authors
The widespread and massive effects of climate are now inevitable, and action must be taken by all sectors to mitigate their contributions to its impacts. The building sector accounts for about 40% of global energy consumption and 30% of GHG emissions. This sector must reduce its energy consumption by at least 50% by shifting to hyper-efficient systems and renewable energy to meet the climate change mitigation goal. Certified green buildings are responsible for about 40% of the office markets in the U. S. and utilize the types of strategies that should be implemented by all new construction and major renovations. Certified green buildings, although highly effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, are generally considered to be an expensive solution to this problem. There is excellent potential for the construction sector to employ a blockchain framework of measurement, report, and verification (MRV) towards building energy performance (BEP) to enable certified green buildings to earn carbon credits based on their exceptional energy performance. Blockchain technology eliminates the need for intermediaries to validate the data and builds up a reliable, immutable, traceable energy monitoring system. The goal of this paper is to present a new blockchain digital MRV architecture for existing BEP and a prototype of its application.
Roman Zeiß, Anne Ixmeier, Jan Recker, Johann Kranz
Abstract One of today's grand societal challenges is to replace the current ‘take‐make‐waste’ economic model with a circular economic model that allows a gradual decoupling of economic activities from the consumption of finite virgin resources. While circular economy (CE) scholars have long lauded digital technologies such as sensors, distributed ledgers, or platforms as key enablers, our own community has not fully explored the potentials of information systems (IS) for a CE. Considering recent technological advances in software and hardware and our history of helping address wicked challenges, we believe the time is ripe to mobilise IS scholarship for a CE. Our findings from an interdisciplinary literature review show that research has primarily examined IS potentials for increasing efficiency of isolated intra‐organisational processes while neglecting the larger sustainability potential of IS to establish circular material flows—that is, slow down and close material loops across entire product lifecycles. In response, we propose directions for IS research that develop our knowledge of how IS can help understand and enact circular material flows to intensify and extend use of products and components and recycle waste materials. Our directions offer pathways to building and evaluating the problem‐solution pairing that could characterise a prolific CE‐IS relationship.
Andrea Di Sorbo, Sonia Laudanna, Anna Vacca, Corrado Aaron Visaggio · 5 authors
Nowadays, more and more applications are developed for running on a distributed ledger technology, namely dApps. The business logic of dApps is usually implemented within smart contracts developed through Solidity, a programming language for writing smart contracts on different blockchain platforms, including the popular Ethereum. In Ethereum, the smart contracts run on the machines of miners and the gas corresponds to the execution fee compensating such computing resources. However, the deployment and execution costs of a smart contract depend on the implementation choices done by developers. Unappropriated design choices could lead to higher gas consumption than necessary. In this paper, we (i) identify a set of 19 Solidity code smells affecting the deployment and transaction costs of a smart contract, and (ii) assess the relevance of such smells through a survey involving 34 participants. On top of these smells, we propose GasMet, a suite of metrics for statically evaluating the code quality of a smart contract from the gas consumption perspective. An experiment involving 2,186 smart contracts demonstrates that the proposed metrics have direct associations with deployment costs. The metrics in our suite can be used for more easily identifying source code segments that need optimizations.