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Privacy-Preserving Smart Grid Tariff Decisions with Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts

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Sustainable Cloud and Energy Services

Abstract

The smart grid changes the way how energy and information are exchanged and offers opportunities for incentive-based load balancing. For instance, customers may shift the time of energy consumption of household appliances in exchange for a cheaper energy tariff. This paves the path towards a full range of modular tariffs and dynamic pricing that incorporate the overall grid capacity as well as individual customer demands. This also allows customers to frequently switch within a variety of tariffs from different utility providers based on individual energy consumption and provision forecasts. For automated tariff decisions it is desirable to have a tool that assists in choosing the optimum tariff based on a prediction of individual energy need and production. However, the revelation of individual load patterns for smart grid applications poses severe privacy threats for customers as analyzed in depth in literature. Similarly, accurate and fine-grained regional load forecasts are sensitive business information of utility providers that are not supposed to be released publicly. This paper extends previous work in the domain of privacy-preserving load profile matching where load profiles from utility providers and load profile forecasts from customers are transformed in a distance-preserving embedding in order to find a matching tariff. The embeddings neither reveal individual contributions of customers nor those of utility providers. Prior work requires a dedicated entity that needs to be trustworthy at least to some extent for determining the matches. In this paper we propose an adaption of this protocol, where we use blockchains and smart contracts for this matching process, instead. Blockchains are gaining widespread adaption in the smart grid domain as a powerful tool for public commitments and accountable calculations. The use of a blockchain for this protocol makes the calculations for tariff matching public, while still maintaining the privacy through embeddings. Further, such decentralized and trust-free blockchains improve the existing solution in terms of verifiability, reliability, and transparency.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The trust-lessness of blockchains relies on the assumption that at least half of the computing power is spent by honest peers [5], as will be described in Sect. 4.3.3.1.

  2. 2.

    https://www.ethereum.org/.

  3. 3.

    https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/.

  4. 4.

    A player could change address for every game providing a means of pseudonymity for this use case. However, for the tariff matching, as shown later, we need to reveal the actual “players” at some point for the oblivious transfer which requires more sophisticated approaches.

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Acknowledgements

The financial support by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy and the Austrian National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development is gratefully acknowledged. Funding by the Federal State of Salzburg is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like to thank their partner Salzburg AG for providing real-world load data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Josef Ressel Center for User-Centric Smart Grid Privacy, Security and Control, Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, Urstein Süd 1, 5412 Puch bei Hallein, Austria

    Fabian Knirsch, Andreas Unterweger, Günther Eibl & Dominik Engel

Authors
  1. Fabian Knirsch
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  2. Andreas Unterweger
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  3. Günther Eibl
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  4. Dominik Engel
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Correspondence to Andreas Unterweger .

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  1. School of Engineering, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, USA

    Wilson Rivera

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Knirsch, F., Unterweger, A., Eibl, G., Engel, D. (2018). Privacy-Preserving Smart Grid Tariff Decisions with Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts. In: Rivera, W. (eds) Sustainable Cloud and Energy Services. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62238-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62238-5_4

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