Privacy-Preserving Transactive Energy Management for IoT-Aided Smart Homes via Blockchain

With the booming of smart grid, the ubiquitously deployed smart meters constitutes an energy Internet of Things (IoT). This article develops a novel blockchain-based transactive energy management (TEM) system for IoT-aided smart homes. We consider a holistic set of options for smart homes to participate in transactive energy. Smart homes can interact with the grid to perform vertical transactions, e.g., feeding in extra solar energy to the grid and providing demand response service to alleviate the grid load. Smart homes can also interact with peer users to perform horizontal transactions, e.g., peer-to-peer energy trading. However, conventional TEM method suffers from the drawbacks of low efficiency, privacy leakage, and single-point failure. To address these challenges, we develop a privacy-preserving distributed algorithm that enables users to optimally manage their energy usages in parallel via the smart contract on the blockchain. Further, we design an efficient blockchain system tailored for IoT devices and develop the smart contract to support the holistic TEM system. Finally, we evaluate the feasibility and performance of the blockchain-based TEM system through extensive simulations and experiments. The results show that the blockchain-based TEM system is feasible on practical IoT devices and reduces the overall cost by 25%.