Mahdi Alkaeed, Md Mohiuddin Soliman, Khaled M. Khan, Tarek Elfouly
In this century, the demand for energy is increasing daily, and the need for energy resources has become urgent and inevitable. New ways of generating energy, such as renewable resources that depend on many sources, including the sun and wind energy will contribute to the future of humankind largely and effectively. These renewable sources are facing major challenges that cannot be ignored which also require more researches on appropriate solutions . This has led to the emergence of a new type of network user called prosumer, which causes new challenges such as the intermittent nature of renewable. Smart grids have emerged as a solution to integrate these distributed energy sources. It also provides a mechanism to maintain safety and security for power supply networks. The main idea of smart grids is to facilitate local production and consumption By customers and consumers.Distributed ledger technology (DLT) or Block-chain technology has evolved dramatically since 2008 that coincided with the birth of its first application Bitcoin, which is the first cryptocurrency. This innovation led to sparked in the digital revolution, which provides decentralization, security, and democratization of information storage and transfer systems across numerous sectors/industries. Block-chain can be applied for the sake of the durability and safety of energy systems. In this paper, we will propose a new distributed framework that provides protection based on block-chain technology for energy systems to enhance self-defense capability against those cyber-attacks.
Yandja Lalle, Lamia Chaari Fourati, Mohamed Fourati, João Paulo Barraca
In Smart Water Grid (SWG), smart water meters (SWMs) are installed in customers ' homes in order to provide near-real-time water consumption data. However, near-real-time data collected by SWMs can reveal the user's privacy. In this paper, we propose a user privacy protection scheme that relies on Blockchain technology and a Machine Learning algorithm called k-means++. K-means++ is used to group users into clusters and, each cluster has a private Blockchain to record its members' data. We use pseudonyms to mask users' identities and the Bloom filter is used for quick authentication. The proposed scheme is validated using simulations in python.
There are rural areas across India and many other countries who receive unreliable and inadequate electricity supply, or no electricity at all. Electricity is essential for the overall development of an individual, and the society in turn benefits from it. Lack of access to grid electricity forces the rural inhabitants to utilize conventional sources of energy, causing not just inconvenience but also deterioration of the environment. In this paper, the reasons preventing reliable power supply to rural places in India have been discussed. Applicability of Blockchain technology to address these challenges and promote rural electrification is being researched. This paper focuses specifically on problems faced by rural communities due to which they avoid electricity connections, and how these problems can be solved by Blockchain technology. Blockchain has the potential to eliminate expensive third-party service costs, generate additional revenue through peer-to-peer trade, planning the power consumption as per budget through smart metering and maintain transparency and accuracy of energy transactions. However, the road to implementation consists of many challenges to overcome which have been discussed in this paper.
Contract-for-Difference financial instruments are available to renewable electricity generators in day-ahead electricity markets to allow them to hedge against revenue risk. Traditional CfDs while designed to hedge revenue risk, introduce other new risks such as counterparty credit, margining and third-party risks. We therefore propose a novel financial instrument - an Ethereum blockchain-based dual escrow smart contract, to serve as the mediator in a CfD agreement between a renewable electricity generator and supplier. This financial instrument addresses hedging related risks that result from traditional CfD agreements in day-ahead electricity markets. In this paper, we design the logic of the financial instrument, translate this logic to smart contract codes and demonstrate its expected performance. Overall, the proposed financial instrument has the benefits of reducing hedging related risks inherent in traditional CfDs. Likewise, it enables secure, efficient, cost-effective, consistent, reliable, transparent and frictionless transactions between contracting parties in a CfD agreement.
The growing trend in the use of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies in modern communities provides several advantages, but also imposes several challenges to energy markets and power systems, in general. This paper aims at providing recommendations for efficient use of digital cryptocurrencies in today's and future smart power systems, in order to face the challenging aspects of this new technology. In this paper, existing issues and challenges of smart grids in the presence of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are presented and some innovative approaches for efficient integration and management of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies in smart grids are proposed. Also some recommendations are given for improving the smart grids performance in the presence of digital cryptocurrencies and some future research directions are highlighted.
The application of smart grids helps optimize electric dispatching and troubleshoot power interruption. Although it provides convenience to our lives, it also causes certain security risks. At present, open wireless sensor network is adopted in smart grids and is vulnerable to cyber attacks, resulting in network congestion and leakage of users' private information. Therefore, an attacker may infer users' identities, behavior and preferences by analyzing the real-time power consumption, which is an immediate threat to the users' privacy. To address this issue, we propose a privacy-preserving scheme based on blockchain and group signature to protect the privacy of users' identities while enhancing the security of power systems. On one hand, smart meters serve as nodes in the blockchain system and ensure data consistency through consensus mechanism. On the other hand, as group members, smart meters make sure of the anonymity of end-users by generating group signatures for power data. Security analysis shows that, our scheme achieves security in terms of privacy preserving, transaction verification and traceability, and is secure against common cyber attacks. In addition, the performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is practical in the sense of consensus delay and throughput.
In order to ensure the information security, most of the important information including the data of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in the energy internet is currently transmitted and exchanged through the intranet or the carrier communication. The former increases the cost of network construction, and the latter is susceptible to interference and attacks in the process of information dissemination. The blockchain is an emerging decentralized architecture and distributed computing paradigm. Under the premise that these nodes do not need mutual trust, the blockchain can implement trusted peer-to-peer communication for protecting the important information by adopting distributed consensus mechanisms, encryption algorithms, point-to-point transmission and smart contracts. In response to the above issues, this paper firstly analyzes the information security problems existing in the energy internet from the four perspectives of system control layer, device access, market transaction and user privacy. Then blockchain technology is introduced, and its working principles and technical characteristics are analyzed. Based on the technical characteristics, we propose the multilevel and multichain information transmission model for the weak centralization of scheduling and the decentralization of transaction. Furthermore, we discuss that the information transmission model helps solve some of the information security issues from the four perspectives of system control, device access, market transaction and user privacy. Application examples are used to illustrate the technical features that benefited from the blockchain for the information security of the energy internet.
In India, we are facing various challenges due to improper management of road construction process. Mostly the contracts of road constructions are manipulated by political leaders or some corrupted personalities. This leads to low quality roads, traffic issues due to extended work on road and various frauds during procurement of raw material and wages of labors. With the help of artificial intelligence, we can determine the duration within which road construction will be completed for particular area, how much raw material is expected, how much labors should be appointed and many more. Blockchain will assure the integrity of contracts within stakeholders. After completion of road, by reviewing user's feedback we can determine quality of road or any maintenance related things by applying Machine learning strategy. Ultimately it will explore an expert system for whole life process of Road Construction which leads to Industry 4.0 in India.
Ever since the invention of Bitcoin by the pseudonymous Satashi Nakamoto, cryptocurrency has provoked debate in banking and finance sectors, and is sometimes considered a potential successor to fiat currency. Blockchain, the new technology underpinning decentralised and immutable databases, has seen much discussion as a potentially game-changing development. Although many industries are exploring its value, the technology has thus far made only minor impacts. A rapidly expanding base of research has emerged on blockchain's role as a potential disruptor in the electrical energy industry. However, it may be difficult to distinguish hype from more imminently plausible impacts. This paper attempts to serve as a guide for engineering management wishing to make sense of blockchain's potential in electricity. This is accomplished by formulating a novel blockchain industry disruption framework, which exists across three tiers. These tiers extend from ideas with the least effect on an industry to total revolutionary concepts that could completely transform an industry. This taxonomy is constructed by examining existing research into disruption hierarchies and blockchain classification methods. Through the lens of this taxonomy, a literature review is performed on blockchain's role in energy to draw out themes and ideas characterising each tier. The potential likelihood of real-world application of various ideas are discussed, giving consideration to how established industries may be affected or disrupted. The authors provide some conjecture here. Finally, courses of action are suggested for those whose sector may be affected by blockchain.
Dimitrios Sikeridis, Ali Bidram, Michael Devetsikiotis, Matthew J. Reno
Distribution and transmission protection systems are considered vital parts of modern smart grid ecosystems due to their ability to isolate faulted segments and preserve the operation of critical loads. Current protection schemes increasingly utilize cognitive methods to proactively modify their actions according to extreme power system changes. However, the effectiveness and robustness of these information-driven solutions rely entirely on the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of the data and control signals exchanged on the underlying relay communication networks. In this paper, we outline a scalable adaptive protection platform for distribution systems, and introduce a novel blockchain-based distributed network architecture to enhance data exchange security among the smart grid protection relays. The proposed mechanism utilizes a tiered blockchain architecture to counter the current technology limitations providing low latency with better scalability. The decentralized nature removes singular points of failure or contamination, enabling direct secure communication between smart grid relays. We also present a security analysis that demonstrates how the proposed framework prohibits any alterations on the blockchain ledger providing integrity and authenticity of the exchanged data (e.g., realtime measurements/relay settings). Finally, the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated through simulation on a blockchain benchmarking framework with the results demonstrating a promising solution for secure smart grid protection system communication.
Energy supply industries play a vital role in a country. Inefficiencies in the energy supply chain regarding tricky contests and the lack of management instantly change energy tariff calculation. This work proposes the Ethereum blockchain platform with existing traditional infrastructure to track and investigate energy supply chain activities using a unique identity with smart contracts. It maintains the records of the organization's protected and available actions to stakeholders according to the recognized collection of procedures and practices without requiring any centralized administration. The purpose of the study is to focus entirely on analyzing and developing a simplified, low-cost, and secure decentralized application (DApp) in the untrusted environment. It should be fit to quickly connect the present energy supply industry at various geological locations to track and trace the energy market's linked data. Keywords: Blockchain, smart contract, energy supply chain, decentralization, design science.
The Bitcoin network is burning a large amount of energy for mining. In this paper, we estimate the lower bound for the global mining energy cost for a period of ten years from 2010 to 2020, taking into account changes in energy costs, improvements in hashing technologies and hashing activity. We estimate energy cost for Bitcoin mining using two methods: Brent Crude oil prices as a global standard and regional industrial electricity prices weighted by the share of hashing activity. Despite a ten-billion-fold increase in hashing activity and a ten-million-fold increase in total energy consumption, we find the cost relative to the volume of transactions has not increased nor decreased since 2010. This is consistent with the perspective that, in order to keep the Blockchain system secure from double spending attacks, the proof or work must cost a sizable fraction of the value that can be transferred through the network. We estimate that in the Bitcoin network this fraction is of the order of 1%.
Juan Carlos Olivares, Enrique Reyes‐Archundia, José Antonio Gutiérrez Gnecchi, Jaime Cerda-Jacobo · 5 authors
Smart metering is among the most important current and future trends in smart grid development. Utility companies spearheading the smart meter revolution claim many benefits for the end-user. One of the key information technology solutions applied to smart meters is ensuring data protection and cybersecurity. Nowadays, the data tampering in smart meters is a big issue for the utilities and end-users. In particular, the advent of secure monetary transactions has inspired the diversification of blockchains as means to provide cybersecurity and encourage end-user trust. The blockchain technology has some issues such as storage and processing, which are necessary to improve for getting better performance in smart metering systems. Here, the authors propose a novel cybersecurity architecture for smart metering systems, based on blockchains to significantly enhance data security. The proposed architecture is divided into multiple tiers directed toward improving performance based on a scheme of edge, fog, and cloud computing. Besides, the authors present an optimized consensus algorithm for smart meters called proof-of-efficiency. The results show that the proposed architecture implemented can effectively improve cybersecurity and data protection for smart metering applications.
Muhammad Baqer Mollah, Jun Zhao, Dusit Niyato, Kwok‐Yan Lam · 8 authors
Due to the unique features and characteristics of blockchain technology, its applications have expanded across various sectors, including finance, banking, supply chains, and smart grids (SGs). Blockchain ensures security and trust in transactions without requiring a third party, making it particularly valuable in decentralized systems. This paper explores the integration of blockchain technology into SG systems. It begins with a comprehensive review of conventional and smart power grids, identifying the key challenges modern SGs face, particularly issues related to trust and fraud. An in-depth analysis of blockchain technology follows, highlighting its potential, advantages, and defining characteristics. The study then examines several blockchain-based SG applications and provides a comparative analysis of prior research. The findings of this review illuminate the critical role of blockchain in enhancing SG performance by addressing trust and fraud prevention challenges. Furthermore, this research has significant implications for the energy sector, as it underscores the potential of blockchain to revolutionize SGs through increased security, transparency, and efficiency. By providing a foundation for future studies, this paper aims to guide the development of unified blockchain frameworks that address scalability, privacy, and energy management, paving the way for a more secure and efficient decentralized energy system
Sarah Tahir Bokhari, Tehreem Aftab, Ibrahim Nadir, Taimur Bakhshi
Current resource consumption monitoring systems such as utility meters allow for easy manipulation to give incorrect readings and generate corrupt bills leading to huge financial losses for utility companies. In order to limit this practice, the present work proposes the use of smart meters in tandem with an Ethereum-based blockchain to secure utility (consumption) data. Electricity generation and smart metering is taken as case-study and the proposed design is benchmarked in terms of time complexity, consensus algorithms, and security to ascertain optimal blockchain parameters for practical deployments. Given the relatively nascent and un-tested existing blockchain communication protocols, a custom TCP-based protocol is also developed to address additional re-validation requirements of the metering data exchanged between the blockchain nodes. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the proposed approach highlights a significant reduction in any human interference and errors that may lead to misappropriations in consumer metering and adds a greater degree of robustness to the billing process for the benefit of utility companies.
Ethereum, a blockchain-based distributed computing platform, provides smart contract functionality. It also provides Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) that can execute peer-to-peer contracts across decentralized network. However, the gas consumption of smart contract is so costly that it becomes one of the important problems to be solved. The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual overview of blockchain based electricity billing system with the aim of lessening gas consumption of the smart contract. In this system, Firebase is employed as a data storage while Ethereum blockchain acts as both a cryptocurrency payment system and an authentication channel. Moreover, this paper illustrates two-factor authentication by utilizing Ethereum account and Firebase Authentication as an authentication channel. Results show that by utilizing Firebase with blockchain, the transaction cost of each transaction made on Ethereum is decreased by approximately 73%.
Madalina-Mihaela Buzau, Javier Tejedor-Aguilera, Pedro Cruz-Romero, Antonio Gómez‐Expósito
Non-technical losses (NTL) in electricity utilities are responsible for major revenue losses. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end solution to self-learn the features for detecting anomalies and frauds in smart meters using a hybrid deep neural network. The network is fed with simple raw data, removing the need of handcrafted feature engineering. The proposed architecture consists of a long short-term memory network and a multi-layer perceptrons network. The first network analyses the raw daily energy consumption history whilst the second one integrates non-sequential data such as its contracted power or geographical information. The results show that the hybrid neural network significantly outperforms state-of-the-art classifiers as well as previous deep learning models used in NTL detection. The model has been trained and tested with real smart meter data of Endesa, the largest electricity utility in Spain.
Development of intelligent systems in particular Water Distribution Systems (WDS) increases the demand of implementing a secure scheme that can preserve user's identification and data consumption through maintaining confidentiality, authentication and integrity. Decentralization topology has investigated a lot recently in the literature with the development of bitcoins and Ethereum networks in different IoT disciplines such as power systems and healthcare systems. In this paper, feasibility and uses cases studies on the integration WDS with Blockchain Technology are discussed. Moreover, the customer's data and identity anonymity techniques that can be integrated with the network are discussed. Furthermore, a data aggregation mechanism of the smart meters in Water Distribution System (WDS) based on distributed ledger and Blockchain technologies is proposed. Further, the customer's identity using bloom filter is simulated and optimal parameters of the bloom filter are suggested.
Ali Dorri, Fengji Luo, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak · 5 authors
Blockchain is increasingly being used to provide a distributed, secure, trusted, and private framework for energy trading in smart grids. However, existing solutions suffer from a lack of privacy, processing and packet overheads, and reliance on trusted third party (TTP) to secure the trade. To address these challenges, we propose a secure private blockchain (SPB) framework. SPB enables energy producers and consumers to directly negotiate the energy price. To reduce the associated overheads, we propose a routing method which routes packets based on the destination public key (PK). SPB eliminates the reliance on TTP to ensure both energy producer and consumer commit to their obligations by introducing atomic meta-transactions. The latter consists of two transactions: first the consumer generates a CTP transaction, committing to pay the energy price to the producer. On receipt of the energy, the smart meter of the consumer generates an energy receipt confirmation (ERC) which triggers a smart contract to transfer the committed price in CTP to the energy producer. To verify that the ERC is generated by a genuine smart meter, SPB supports authentication of anonymous smart meters to prevent malicious nodes from linking ERC transactions and thus enhance the user privacy. Qualitative security analysis shows the resilience of SPB against a range of attacks. Implementation results demonstrate that SPB reduces monetary cost and delay compared to existing solutions.
Power systems are experiencing evolutionary changes. Future grids will be smarter and with a higher level of autonomy. In addition, the penetration of demand-side small-scale distributed generation is mounting. The proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs) conveys a promising and brilliant future for this technology, particularly for vehicles with V2G capability, that will result in a boom in the pervasiveness of EVs in the next decades. Digitalization and modernization of power systems, as well as ever-growing technological advances in information and communications technology (ICT) and the internet of things (IoT), will procure a smart platform that facilitates peer-to-peer (P2P) communication of power systems’ elements. Thus, future power systems will be immensely complicated and interconnected in terms of data transfer and data processing. Hence, in addition to the employment of big data techniques, some structural changes are required to deal with such a massive body of data. Therefore, the security of data must be ensured specifically for financial transactions. Furthermore, in the future grids, millions of microsources will sell their generating power to the local loads in demand-side, and a load may be served by several microsources. Furthermore, flexible loads can use this platform to trade interchangeably with inelastic loads or the main grid. In this respect, myriad transactions must be recorded, which cannot be handled with the current banking system. This matter necessitates the deployment of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies for handling these microtransactions without needing to supervisory and authority. Hence, a proper platform is indispensable to connect the vendors and purchasers easily and executes the transaction after authentication, validation, and verification of both sides. This study delves into the necessity of employment of blockchain in power systems. Besides, the conceptual background of blockchain and cryptocurrency are explained.
In this paper, we propose a secure system design for implementing the minimal-information exchange framework to efficiently provide services; the application of this concept is in the context of electricity services. The information being exchanged is dictated by the Dynamic Monitoring and Decision Systems (DyMonDS) platform, which enables optimal global solutions to be derived even in a largely distributed setting. This capability parallels the increasing number of smart Internet of Things (IoT) devices that allow for a responsive and flexible service. These advancements are aligned in the Secure Blockchain-Enabled DyMonDS design, where a secure communication protocol enables smart embedded devices to communicate with local compute nodes; these compute nodes are connected in a meshed blockchain network, providing information security, integrity, and robustness.