Abstract:
The increasing strain on ageing generation infrastructure has seen more frequent instances
of scheduled and unscheduled blackouts, rising reliability on fossil fuel based energy alternatives
and a slow down in efforts towards achieving universal access to electrical energy in South Africa.
To try and relieve the burden on the National Grid and still progress electrification activities, the
smart microgrid model and secure energy trade paradigm is considered—enabled by the Industrial
IoT (IIoT) and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). Given the high availability requirements
of microgrid operations, the limited resources available on IIoT devices and the high processing
and energy requirements of DLT operations, this work aims to determine the effect of native DLT
algorithms when implemented on IIoT edge devices to assess the suitability of DLTs as a mechanism
to establish a secure, energy trading market for the Internet of Energy. Metrics such as the node
transaction time, operating temperature, power consumption, processor and memory usage are
considered towards determining possible interference on the edge node operation. In addition, the
cost and time required for mining operations associated with the DLT-enabled node are determined
in an effort to predict the cost to end users—in terms of fees payable and mobile data costs—as well
as predicting the microgrid’s growth and potential blockchain network slowdown.
Description:
This article is an expansion upon the following conference publication: Ledwaba, L.P.I.; Hancke, G.P.; Isaac,
S.J.; Venter, H.S. Developing a Secure, Smart Microgrid Energy Market using Distributed Ledger Technologies.
In Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE 17th International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN), Helsinki,
Finland, 22–25 July 2019; pp. 1725–1728, doi:10.1109/INDIN41052.2019.8972018.
