A Trusted and Privacy-preserving Internet of Mobile Energy

Abstract

The rapid growth in distributed energy sources on power grids leads to increasingly decentralised energy management systems for the prediction of power supply and demand and the dynamic setting of an energy price signal. Within this emerging smart grid paradigm, electric vehicles can serve as consumers, transporters, and providers of energy through two-way charging stations, which highlights a critical feedback loop between the movement patterns of these vehicles and the state of the energy grid. This paper proposes a vision for an Internet of Mobile Energy (IoME), where energy and information flow seamlessly across the power and transport sectors to enhance the grid stability and end user welfare. We identify the key challenges of trust, scalability, and privacy, particularly location and energy linking privacy for EV owners, for realising the IoME vision. We propose an information architecture for IoME that uses scalable blockchain to provide energy data integrity and authenticity, and introduces one-time keys for public EV transactions and a verifiable anonymous trip extraction method for EV users to share their trip data while protecting their location privacy. We present an example scenario that details the seamless and closed loop information flow across the energy and transport sectors, along with a blockchain design and transaction vocabulary for trusted decentralised transactions. We finally discuss the open challenges presented by IoME that can unlock significant benefits to grid stability, innovation, and end user welfare.