Abstract
Nowadays, it has been recognized that blockchain can provide the technological infrastructure for developing decentralized, secure, and reliable smart energy grid management systems. However, an open issue that slows the adoption of blockchain technology in the energy sector is the low scalability and high processing overhead when dealing with the real-time energy data collected by smart energy meters. Thus, in this paper, we propose a scalable second tier solution which combines the blockchain ledger with distributed queuing systems and NoSQL (Not Only SQL database) databases to allow the registration of energy transactions less frequently on the chain without losing the tamper-evident benefits brought by the blockchain technology. At the same time, we propose a technique for tamper-evident registration of smart meters’ energy data and associated energy transactions using digital fingerprinting which allows the energy transaction to be linked hashed-back on-chain, while the sensors data is stored off-chain. A prototype was implemented using Ethereum and smart contracts for the on-chain components while for the off-chain components we used Cassandra database and RabbitMQ messaging broker. The prototype proved to be effective in managing a settlement of energy imbalances use-case and during the evaluation conducted in simulated environment shows promising results in terms of scalability, throughput, and tampering of energy data sampled by smart energy meters.
Highlights
The rising shares of intermittent decentralized renewable energy prosumption sources are completely changing the way in which electricity grids are managed to provide electricity to consumers while preserving continuity and security of supply at affordable costs
We aim to show how our second tier technical solution could be used for implementing the settlement of imbalances process with low latency and high throughput of transactions processing while benefiting on tamper-evident features and smart contracts-based settlement
There are second tier solutions in literature which are appreciated for low cost and high channel opening, many transfers
Summary
The rising shares of intermittent decentralized renewable energy prosumption sources are completely changing the way in which electricity grids are managed to provide electricity to consumers while preserving continuity and security of supply at affordable costs. The smart grid management problems can no longer be efficiently addressed by using centralized management solutions, the need for developing decentralized approaches and architectures are widely recognized. IoT (Internet of Things) smart energy sensing devices that measure, collect, and communicate energy data has created the opportunity for developing rather sophisticated smart grid management services and generated problems in managing the big amounts of generated data. Thanks to the increased efficiency of end-user appliances, low-cost photovoltaics, and disruptive technologies such as virtual financial services, decentralized energy networks are rapidly spreading, contributing to low-carbon, sustainable energy systems [1]. The integration of decentralized energy systems at neighborhood scale allows to lower peaks in energy demands on the electrical grid, to reduce the overall consumption [2], and reduce the disparity terms of reliability and cost in rural and remote. Future energy systems should be characterized by the key principles of decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization [4]
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