| dc.description.abstract | With more outages in recent times, the energy sector needs to shift to more reliable electricity grid. Smart grids are the new solution where it is much more reliable and secure than the traditional electricity grid. The use of smart grid would help with integrating new technologies to the grid such as the blockchain. The blockchain is a public distributed ledger which stores transactions in blocks that are chained together by cryptographic hashes. The blockchain is managed by a peer-to-peer network autonomously without the need of a central entity. The use of blockchain in smart grids will help in removing the third parties in transactions, which makes it easier for smaller energy providers to enter the market. Also, the blockchain is immutable due to how each block is chained together, if you alter a block, it causes a chain effect and changes subsequent blocks. Thus, it is impossible to hack as other nodes in the network have a copy of the blockchain and they can easily identity a corrupted blockchain. In this paper, we explore the use of blockchain in handling smart grid transactions. A smart grid specialized blockchain was developed in Python. The users can interact with the blockchain by sending HTTP requests over Postman. Postman is a program for API testing, and it is the main user interface. The blockchain developed is account based, so the user has to generate an e-Wallet before running transactions on the blockchain. There are three types of users in the blockchain, a generator, a prosumer, and a customer. Based on the type, the user can then either generate electricity and sell it over the blockchain or purchase the electricity then consume it. The users can either run transactions or mine blocks in the blockchain. | |
