Integrating Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) into smart grids presents challenges in privacy and transparency for Demand Response (DR) programs. Blockchain offers a secure, but transparent solution, risking privacy. ‘CypherChain’ is introduced as a novel framework for these programs, utilizing Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), Homomorphic Encryption (HE), and Hypergraph Coloring via CHAIN and CYPHER protocols. These ensure private data aggregation and encrypted processing, balancing privacy with transparency. Tested on real-world smart building data, CypherChain improved data aggregation speed by 40% and cut computational costs by 30% against existing systems, showcasing its potential to revolutionize privacy in smart grids and address DR programs’ privacy-transparency issues.

Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize the energy sector by enabling peer-to-peer energy trading, demand-side flexibility trading, and renewable energy certificate trading, among other decentralised energy trading use cases. However, the lack of interoperability between blockchain networks and platforms is a significant challenge that leads to data and information silos. To address this challenge, a Blockchain Agnostic Interoperability Framework (BAILIF) is proposed, which provides a decentralized notary service and a cross-chain attestation and verification protocol. BAILIF adheres to the core principles of blockchain, such as decentralization, transparency, and trust, and can be adopted in other decentralized ecosystems where blockchain interoperability is required. A proof of concept for a distributed energy trading application demonstrates the solution's feasibility. The results showed that BAILIF could achieve a throughput of up to 666 transactions per second, indicating its potential to enable seamless data sharing across blockchain platforms and promote the adoption of renewable energy sources.

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and distributed energy resources (DERs), has given rise to collaborative communities that manage their energy production and consumption load through peer-to-peer decentralized energy trading (P2P DET). To address the issue of distributed trust in these communities, blockchain technology is widely considered as a promising solution due to its ability to provide records provenance and visibility. However, the current blockchain-based platforms are known to compromise on scalability and privacy in favor of trustless interactions and often do not support interoperability. In this work, we propose a hypergraph-based adaptive consortium blockchain (HARB) framework, which coordinates DERs through high-order relationships rather than P2P pairwise relationships. HARB is presented in a three-layered network architecture to address the aforementioned challenges. The bottom layer (Underlay) addresses the issue of scalability, by exploiting the rich representation ability of hypergraphs to describe complex relationships among DERs and end users. We use the described complex relations to form scalable network clusters with intra- and inter-community energy trading relationships. The middle layer (Overlay) presents a blockchain service model to describe adaptive blockchain modules that support interoperability between the network clusters. To preserve privacy, we present a data tagging and anonymization model in the top layer (Contract), which attributes transactions to specific network clusters. To evaluate our framework, we modeled various IoT devices with different computing resource profiles to simulate a distributed energy trading (DET) environment. The analyzed results have shown that our proposed framework can effectively improve the performance of blockchain-based DET systems.

Several initiatives have been proposed to collect, report, and analyze data about school systems for supporting decision-making. These initiatives rely mostly on self-reported and summarized data collected irregularly and rarely. They also lack a single independent and systematic process to validate the collected data during its entire lifecycle. Furthermore, schools in developing countries still do not maintain complete and up-to-date school records. Due to these and other factors addressing the education challenges in those countries remains a high priority for local and international governments, donor and non-governmental agencies across the world. In this paper, we discuss our initial design, implementation, and evaluation of a blockchain-enabled School Information Hub (SIH) using Kenya's school system as a case study.