Smart Contracts for a Secure and Privacy-Preserving Smart Grid

The current energy landscape faces challenges such as escalating demand, rising prices, and the depletion of traditional energy sources. Existing electricity grids face significant limitations and vulnerabilities and the society would clearly benefit from the adoption of a new energy model that integrates locally-generated renewable energy. In order to achieve that, the use of the smart grid has been proposed as a way to modernize and optimize energy distribution. Generally, current works in the literature that study this area fail to effectively address the security and privacy threats that smart grids and their users may face while participating in the system. Moreover, those proposals that consider the privacy of the users do not prevent them from performing fraudulent actions while they hide in the anonymity. As a result of that, in this work, we propose a new smart grid system which uses blockchain technology and smart contracts as core components. The new scheme takes into account the privacy of the users and the availability and security of the system; while still offering measures to identify and take punitive actions against misbehaving users.