A Study of Block Chain-Based Peer-to-Peer Energy Loan Service in Smart Grid Environments

Unlike conventional one-way power flow, smart grid system is of intelligent power grid, based on interaction between power supplier and buyer. In this interactive environment, for example, power user that has its own power production facility can re-sell electricity produced in the self-production facility to other users. A control center supplies and re-sells electricity as key operator. However, the supply of electricity comes to halt when the server of the key operator suddenly fails. Although smart grid can be an alternative to prevent blackout in this case, it is useless if power is not smoothly supplied to power grid even in a normal condition except blackout. In this respect, the present study was aimed to propose P2P energy loan service using block chain-based P2P loan process. Therefore, the proposed power grid system is efficient and can secure reliability by verifying the details of each energy transaction in a server. In addition, block chain technology proposed in this study does not require additional installation of infrastructure such as server and instead users can use existing resources in operating power grid system. This study confirmed that the encryption and security elements of the proposed system are safe from man-in-the-middle attack, replay attack, and masquerading attack. Therefore, it is expected that the proposed P2P energy loan design can be applied to smart grid environment.