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 privacy-preserving 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.