Designing a blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving energy theft detection system for smart grid neighborhood area network

Abstract

In smart grid neighbourhood area network (NAN), the grid utility faces a huge economic loss due to smart meter tampering and energy theft. The faulty meters may increase the cost to consumers. The existing solutions lack in detecting the energy theft accurately and preserving the privacy of the consumers. In this paper, a blockchain-enabled energy theft detection system with privacy-preservation of energy consumption data is proposed for smart grid NAN. It deploys smart contracts viz; energy supply, energy consumption and energy theft detection on the hyperledger besu. Here, the supplied energy to the consumers is monitored using the energy supply contract, whereas the energy consumption is reported to the grid utility through energy consumption contract that preserves privacy of the consumers’ energy consumption data. The energy theft detection contract detects the energy theft and faulty meters accurately. The proposed system is validated using a test-bed at NIT Goa by considering the test scenario of energy theft and faulty smart meters. It achieves >98% accuracy in energy theft detection with sufficient throughput (>98.37 tps) and an affordable latency (<0.42 seconds) of energy data transactions, while fulfilling the energy theft detection requirements in smart grid NAN.