Electric vehicles are gaining widespread adoption and are a key component in the establishment of the smart grid. Beside the increasing number of electric vehicles, a dense and widespread charging infrastructure will be required. This offers the opportunity for a broad range of different energy providers and charging station operators, both of which can offer energy at different prices depending on demand and supply. While customers benefit from a liberalized market and a wide selection of tariff options, such dynamic pricing use cases are subject to privacy issues and allow to detect the customer's position and to track vehicles for, e.g., targeted advertisements. In this paper we present a reliable, automated and privacy-preserving selection of charging stations based on pricing and the distance to the electric vehicle. The protocol builds on a blockchain where electric vehicles signal their demand and charging stations send bids similar to an auction. The electric vehicle owner then decides on a particular charging station based on the supply-side offers it receives. This paper shows that the use of blockchains increases the reliability and the transparency of this approach while preserving the privacy of the electric vehicle owners.

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Blockchains are proposed for many application domains apart from financial transactions. While there are generic blockchains that can be molded for specific use cases, they often lack a lightweight and easy-to-customize implementation. In this paper, we introduce the core concepts of blockchain technology and investigate a real-world use case from the energy domain, where customers trade portions of their photovoltaic power plant via a blockchain. This does not only involve blockchain technology, but also requires user interaction. Therefore, a fully custom, private, and permissioned blockchain is implemented from scratch. We evaluate and motivate the need for blockchain technology within this use case, as well as the desired properties of the system. We then describe the implementation and the insights from our implementation in detail, serving as a guide for others and to show potential opportunities and pitfalls when implementing a blockchain from scratch.

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Despite the large number of privacy-preserving aggregation protocols in the Smart Grid, there is no common methodology for evaluating and comparing their privacy guarantees. Protocol discussion often lacks a formal evaluation of the proposed privacy guarantees. In order to transfer the wellestablished formal methodology of game-based proofs to the Smart Grid domain, in this paper, we present (i) a game-based privacy definition which addresses the privacy requirement to be captured in an aggregation protocol (the definition may be used or extended for other protocols); (ii) we exemplify our game-based proof technique for two aggregation protocols, and (iii) we provide a novel and compact way to visualize and easily compare the privacy guarantees of different protocols. We employ two sample protocols that reflect the basis of the most common approaches currently found in the energy aggregation literature. In summary, we contribute a guideline on how to conduct formal evaluations for protocol developers as well as an easy-to-understand way to assess the privacy guarantees of different aggregation protocols for non-experts.