Providing Trust in a Dynamic Distributed Energy Production Scenario by means of a Blockchain

In the near future, a large number of actors will be involved in the production, exchange and consumption of green energy. Such actors are generally small and no central authority is put into place for operations such as e.g. the handling of monetary accounts, for letting consumers paying and producers being paid, etc. For embracing a large amount of actors in a system that does not rely on a central authority, some mechanisms of trust have to be properly embedded. On top of such mechanisms, then the balancing of monetary accounts can be achieved. We have developed a distributed solution catering for the recording of counterfeit-resistant data that characterise energy production by small producers, as well as energy consumption from others. For this, we have devised the need of aggregators that, while gathering data, compute a signature (or hash) for the data received. To make such a signature immutable, we resort to the blockchain technology. In this way, the authenticity of data stored off-chain can be checked by matching them with the immutable signature read from the blockchain storage.