Real-Time Monitoring of Smart Meters Based on Blockchain Technology

Introduction

In this chapter primarily discuss how blockchain is being utilized in smarter grids across the globe and how some use cases can be good fit as a technology. Currently from a blockchain point of view the energy market is somewhere around USD 180 million dollars and it is expected in next five years it will grow to something like 5000 USD. Different businesses are actually using blockchain for various things but then particularly for financial transactions and interactions because it offers a secure way of secure channel for doing business, managing data and all that now it has really made a significant impact on the operational cost in reducing the operational costs and maintaining the data integrity one can reduce the capital expenditure for that matter in terms of adoption (Gao, 2018). That's the reason why globally the energy markets are looking to blockchain as a long-term solution to most of the problems at the current. As we know, energy segment is facing a couple of key players which are doing some really fantastic work in terms of blockchains in energy segment particularly power ledger .A network of computers now as they are distributed network computers they do not provide any scope for hackers to try and play with the system for two reasons. One is the blockchain is basically a string of blocks connected to each other until acted to each other which are more like in cryptographically hashed right (Beck et al., 2016). So the hash of block 0 will be used to encrypt the block 1 and the hash of block 1 is used to encrypt block 2 and so on . So the point is the longer the chain grows it is absolutely impossible to manipulate or alter anything in the chain. Since this is distributed so there are multiple partners in the business network who will have a copy of the same ledger so importantly if any hacker tries to change or to manipulate a content in a particular segment of a ledger, it will automatically get invalidated and it will be of no use because there are so many nice good copies available on the network which can be used from there onwards and that's the reason it has hardly any scope for a hacker to do anything there and that's a reason why so many industries are working towards adoption of blockchain from the industry from the energy industry point of view blockchain is offering a new tempo proof mechanism for authentication, authorization and data exchanges (Cohn et al, 2017; Kumar, 2020; Mika & Alexander, 2020). These are the three basic tenets where one can see a lot of adoption in energy grids from blockchain technology point of view .

Relying on automation and remote access because of which there are a couple of security concerns which we need to deal with. Particularly two majors things, one is the authentication which is the verification that someone who is entering into the system is a genuine person having the right identity to do it and second is the authorization that the verification is someone who does enter has the authority to do what he has to do so. The point is authentication and authorization are two important aspects where smart bits needs to be tackled because of automation and remote access. If one can see a few application areas of blockchain in a smarter grid, first is prevents hacking in malicious attacks. Since blockchain has a security which is enabled through a public/private encryption with key access. So anybody who is trying to get into a system must verify the credentials, must verify their energy and their authentication to do anything on the network. Blockchain is the necessary technology to really make the power grid safe.