Privacy-Preserving Energy Storage Sharing with Blockchain and Secure Multi-Party Computation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain and secure multi-party computation-based system for privacy-preserving energy storage sharing, enabling cost-effective community energy management without revealing individual demands, and includes empirical evaluation on Ethereum.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated privacy-preserving approach for energy storage sharing using blockchain and secure multi-party computation, without needing a trusted third-party.

Findings

Successfully implemented as an Ethereum smart contract

Ensures privacy even with dishonest majority of users

Provides effective auditing and verification mechanisms

Abstract

Energy storage provides an effective way of shifting temporal energy demands and supplies, which enables significant cost reduction under time-of-use energy pricing plans. 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 the 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 to an external energy storage operator may compromise user privacy, and is 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 a trusted third-party. We implemented our solution as a smart contract on real-world Ethereum blockchain platform, and provide empirical evaluation in this paper.