Performance Enhancement of Smart Grid via Blockchain Technology

Project Title

Performance Enhancement of Smart Grid via Blockchain Technology

Project Area of Specialization BlockchainProject Summary

The next-generation electric power system, known as the “smart grid”, is a promising solution to the long-term industry evolution. The smart grid is expected to revolutionize electricity generation, transmission, and distribution by allowing two-way flows for both electrical power and information.

The introduction of smart grids is one of these innovations in what is basically a fusion between the traditional energy grids with the IT sector. Even though this new combination brings a plethora of advantages, it also comes with an increase of the attack surface of the energy grid, which becomes susceptible to cyberattacks.

Project Objectives

The main objectives of this research are as follow:

1. The goal is to devise a system to promote local energy production, and then avoid the energy transport loses over long distances.
2. To provide secure, energy ef?cient, and cost effective power supply to consumers by utilizing the renewable energy sources and distributed generation integrating on site generation strategies.
3. To achieve an optimization of the electrical consumption and avoid too much disruption of the network.
4. Using Peer-to-peer energy transactions could reduce the high electrical demand for the existing grid and Blockchain will be used to secure and memorize transactions.

Project Implementation Method

To conduct our study we propose a systematic research process that focuses on being objective and gathering information. The steps to conduct our study were:

• Doing literature review to get a better grasp of the concept.
• Identifying the problem areas within the Blockchain technology.
• Selecting the field area we need to work on (problem formulation).
• Looking for multiple approaches and solution for the problem, then forming an algorithm.
• Using software tools for simulation of the proposed selected scheme.
• Analyzing the results obtained.

A big part of our study is based on how good we do our literature review and academic papers are our primary necessity, there we intend to utilize good and reliable source platforms like IEEE to collect our academic literature. And for simulation we use Solidity and Python software.

Benefits of the Project

In today’s society there are enormous changes in climate due to increase in global warming which are cause by emission of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases, and an important contributor for these gases is burning of fossils fuels for production of electricity. So the need to switch to renewable energy resources is more than ever.

But incorporating these in the traditional grid system is not possible. The system is not flexible so that it is difficult to either inject electricity from alternative sources at any point along the grid, or to efficiently and sustainably manage new services desired by the users of electricity.

Also traditional Power grid station are fully connected network where even small villages need to connect to the main provider. Maintenance costs of such network are very high especially if distances are very long. There is probability of high line losses for which the user or the provider will have to suffer. So there is also a need of decentralization.

In order to overcome these drawbacks we switch to smart grids, there are many benefits of converting to smart grids rather than sticking to the traditional one. Decarbonizing electricity supply while doubling the production and switching to renewable resources like hydro, wind, air etc. As compare to traditional grids, Smart grid technology is environmental friendly, cheap, can easily be handle and control, and even economical by being a source of earning by selling the extra electricity.

The alarming situation of climatic changes indicate that it’s high time that we need to start to invest in the environment and save it for all of our generations to come before any permanent damage is done to environment with huge consequences. This research in a step in that direction on our behalf.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Cybersecurity in the smart grid is a relatively new area of research and our work shows an initial survey of security requirements and challenges. Blockchain serves as a solution to overcome the different security issues in the smart grid technology. But Even though the proposed solutions still remain an uncharted territory in smart grid applications, the advancements in Blockchain make it more attractive technology thus far in the pursuit of building a secure and resilient smart grid. And also with the developments in the cyber-attacks, Blockchain seems to be a promising solution.

Due to some vulnerabilities of Blockchain, some general attack possible[2]:

• 51% vulnerability
• Cyber-attacks
• Selfish-mining

Apart from this Blockchain based smart grid also suffers from the classical network vulnerabilities:

• DoS attacks
• Sybil attacks

The attacks we are focusing on are:

• Sybil Attack
• Eclipse Attach

Final Deliverable of the Project Software SystemCore Industry ITOther Industries Energy , Security Core Technology BlockchainOther Technologies Shared Economy, OthersSustainable Development Goals Affordable and Clean EnergyRequired Resources

Item Name	Type	No. of Units	Per Unit Cost (in Rs)	Total (in Rs)
			Total in (Rs)	10000
Paper Publication Fee 75$	Miscellaneous	10	1000	10000