Privacy-Preserving Energy Storage Sharing with Blockchain

Abstract

Energy storage provides an effective way of shifting temporal energy demands and supplies, enabling significant cost reduction under dynamic energy pricing. Despite its promising benefits, the cost of present energy storage remains expensive, presenting a major obstacle to practical deployment. A more viable solution to improve cost-effectiveness is by sharing energy storage, such as community sharing, cloud energy storage and peer-to-peer sharing. However, revealing private energy demand data in energy storage sharing may compromise user privacy, susceptible to data misuses and breaches. In this paper, we explore a novel approach to support energy storage sharing with privacy protection, based on privacypreserving blockchain and secure multi-party computation. We present an integrated solution to enable privacy-preserving energy storage sharing, such that energy storage service scheduling and cost-sharing can be attained without the knowledge of individual users' demands. It also supports auditing and verification by the grid operator via blockchain. Furthermore, our privacy-preserving solution can safeguard against a dishonest majority of users, who may collude in cheating, without requiring trusted third-parties. We implemented our solution as a smart contract on real-world Ethereum blockchain platform, with empirical evaluation.

Evaluating the Barriers to Blockchain Adoption in the Energy Sector: A Multicriteria Approach Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process for Group Decision Making

“…The efficient management of energy storage units could guarantee the flexibility of modern energy systems, satisfying demand or acting as a backup source to prevent blackouts. Blockchain models could support energy storage applications by coordinating battery charging and protecting sensitive or personal user data [66,67].…”

Smart contracts and homomorphic encryption for private P2P energy trading and demand response on blockchain

“…Various cryptographic techniques are employed to ensure the privacy of energy data in blockchain infrastructures [ [26] , [27] , [28] ]. Commitment schemes rely on cryptography to allow one to commit a value and at the same time, keep it hidden from others.…”

“…Such schemes are used in various energy-related use cases such as decentralized energy trading or sharing of energy assets. Wang et al [ 26 ] propose the use of Pedersen's commitment to assuring a privacy-preserving sharing of energy storage without requiring a trusted third party in a blockchain-based implementation. Secure multiparty computation enables prosumers to trade their excess electricity in a privacy-preserving manner [ 29 ].…”

Blockchain-enabled decentralized privacy-preserving group purchasing for retail energy plans

“…The users generate a multi-transaction request with concealed transaction values Cm(𝜙 𝑖 ) 𝑖 ∈𝑋 . The transaction generation will be handled in a privacy-preserving manner via SPDZ, which follows a similar privacy-preserving payment system in [37]. Because of the paucity of space, we skip the protocol, and defer the details to Appendix D.2.…”

“…However, very few studies considered the privacy of blockchain, even transaction data on the ledger is entirely disclosed to the public. [37] recently proposed a privacy-preserving solution for energy storage sharing using blockchain and secure multi-party computation. This work draws on similar concepts from privacypreserving blockchain, but also addressing a different problem of decentralized group purchasing of energy plans.…”