Performance Analysis of Blockchain based Smart Grids with Ethereum and Hyperledger Implementations

Abstract

Smart grids lay the foundation for future communities. Smart homes, smart buildings, smart streets, and smart offices are built when intelligent devices piles on intelligent devices. To reach the maximum capacity, they all must be supported by an intelligent power supply. For optimal and real-time electricity consumption, monitoring and trading, blockchain posses several potential benefits in its application to electricity infrastructure. To analyze the performance of the blockchain-based smart grid, this paper presents a virtual smart grid. A smart grid equipped with smart contracts, capable of executing virtual activities is evaluated and possible strengths and weaknesses are discussed. The paper draws a performance analysis of the blockchain-based smart grid by using the Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric-based implementations.

Can Blockchain Strengthen the Energy Internet?

“…Decentralized scalability is a requisite to cater to the demands of the distributed grid operation with minimal third-party involvement; hence trust establishment mechanism should be transparent. Existing blockchain platforms have not reached the level of maturity to cater to the extensive numbers of stakeholders integrating with the EI grid [64]. Secure and privacy-preserving techniques, which do not trade-off scalable blockchain solutions, need to be considered for future electricity distribution networks to attain maximum benefits.…”

“…Achieving distributed scalability at the cost of compromising information security and privacy of the user respectively defies the expectations of the future grids. The blockchain trilemma would receive attention in the pathway towards successful implementation of the futuristic grid infrastructure [64]. The vulnerabilities in grid security would expand beyond the current extent with the scalable, decentralized operations.…”

“…Lessons: Scalability of EI grids are partly addressed through off-chain and side-chain implementations [65] as well as suitable selection of the blockchain platform [21,32,66]. This includes scalable initiatives such as NRG Xchange [32] and analytical selection of the blockchain platform such as HyperLedger over Ethereum [64]. Energy data management with the increasing number of consumer connections would be a challenge to be addressed, while facilitating low-latency grid synchronization of DERs has not been discussed in the existing literature [12,65,67].…”

Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges

“…The significant benefits of blockchain were highlighted including trustworthiness and convenience in monetization. The application of blockchain which helps to optimize network data and recording residual energy at the substation level was one of the significant features expected of incorporation of smart contracts in the energy applications.Malik [226] developed a blockchain based smart grid for peer to peer energy trading. The performance compared using Ethereum and Hyperledger blockchain platforms.…”

Blockchain for 5G and IoT: Opportunities and Challenges

“…are some of the examples of massive IoT, whereas, Industrial IoT (IIoT), remote surgery, IoT enabled autonomous vehicles, tactile internet, etc. are the examples of mission critical IoT [14].…”