Privacy-Preserving Electric Vehicle Charging for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Ecosystems

Abstract

The proliferation of renewable energy systems and high-capacity batter- ies has enabled customers to trade their excess energy on the market in a peer-to-peer manner through the smart grid. At the same time, electric vehicles EVs are enjoying widespread acceptance, leading to a higher de- mand for charging stations. This thesis proposes a system where energy traders and EV owners collectively work to satisfy the energy demands of EVs. Specifically, energy traders make bids to EV owners who, in turn, reserve their preferred charging station for a specific period of time. To pro- tect the privacy of EV owners, we also introduce an anonymous payment system that cannot link individual owners to specific charging locations. Finally, to guarantee the security and transparency of the entire system, all transactions are stored on a consortium blockchain that is managed by the energy traders and the financial institutions that support the anony- mous payment system. Our proposed payment system can be implemented in other peer-to-peer trading and the overall scheme can be expanded to handle discharging of EVs. A proof-of-concept prototype is implemented to evaluate the system. The experimental results indicate that the over- head of the cryptographic operations involved in the major transactions is acceptable, in terms of both computational and communication costs.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Science and Engineering