Smart Contracts for Smart Grid

Abstract

Electricity has become one of the basic needs of mankind today right after oxygen and food. Starting from our hospitals to homes, schools and offices, electric cars and trains, factories and communication systems, there is not a single area of life that does not make use of electricity. Even so, the natural resources that we have been using for over a century for electricity production have immense hazardous effects on all life forms and planet Earth. To counter this issue of green gas emissions and other forms of pollution, we can make use of alternate and harmless natural resources; Renewable Energy Resources. People around the globe have been deploying the equipment for power generation using RES, but there is a big problem of energy trading among the peers without involving a centralized authority. In the last decade, blockchain revolutionized distributed systems. Apart from being used for decentralized cryptocurrencies, the introduction of smart contracts opened the doors between blockchain and several other systems like; food tracking, educational and professional certificates tracking, drugs and medicines tracking, securing the data collected by IoT devices on cloud, insurance systems, diamond registry, real-estate etc. Realizing the needs of our system, we present a blockchain based en ergy trading system. Our proposed solution eliminates the need of a central authority figure and a centralized database, by deploying a tamper-proof permissioned blockchain. The smart contract has strict access control rights on its functions and the roles of stakeholders are exclusive. Our solution provides the prosumers and consumers with a transparent, secure and reliable energy trading system.