Charging infrastructure is a key factor in successful electric vehicle adoption. Charging stations are still a fragmented market in terms of ownership, lack of standards, and charging protocols. The increasing decentralised grid has made energy and communication flow bi-directional. Challenges arise in maintaining the increasing decentralised structure, security, and privacy of the network. Blockchain facilitates the interconnectedness of such a distributed and decentralised network. Blockchain's versatility lies in its transparent and immutable decentralized architecture that enables direct transactions between users without the need of a middleman. It provides powerful safeguards against cyberattacks with its advanced cryptography enabling privacy-preserving authentication. This chapter presents a comprehensive review on the application of blockchain technology in EV charging infrastructure such as facilitating the peer-to-peer energy exchange, increased security and privacy, immutable transactions, and mitigating trust issues among the participants in the charging infrastructure.
Top1. Introduction
The history of Electric vehicles dates back to the mid-19th century (Guarnieri, 2012). Cheap abundant gasoline along with the continued improvement in the internal combustion engine contributed to the premature decline of electric vehicles. The energy crisis of 1970's renewed interest in sustainable technological development including alternative means of transport (Behrens & Glover, 2012). However, the technology of the time hampered its successful revival. The advancement in the semiconductor and battery technology have revived the electric vehicle industry (Larminie & Lowry, 2012). The transition towards low carbon energy economy entails adoption of renewable energy resources, energy storage systems, Electric Vehicles (EV's), corresponding charging infrastructure, smart buildings, and prosumers to engage actively in the electricity markets (Kobashi, 2020). E-mobility plays a crucial role in reducing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2020). Faster adoption of electric vehicles is only possible with an equal emphasis on EV charging infrastructure. While there are many charging technologies available (Ahmad et al., 2017) (Patil et al., 2017), the commercial success will be one that is accessible, easy to use, and relatively inexpensive.
The challenges of EV charging infrastructures are high cost, multiple charging protocols, disagreements over infrastructure ownership, mistrust and lack of coordination in its fragmented market (Lee & Clark, 2018), (Das et al., 2020). The automation of charging infrastructure adds to these challenges with issues concerning privacy and security of data exchanged. Moreover, the information and communication flow in energy network is becoming increasingly distributed and complex, overwhelming the current centralized structure. Blockchain helps facilitate transaction of data and energy through peer-to-peer(P2P) trading, increased security and privacy via cryptography, provides trust and transparency with its distributed and decentralised database and allows anyone to become a part of the network system (Brilliantova & Thurner, 2019). Their applications have moved beyond the financial sector (Underwood, 2016)–(Casino et al., 2019). Blockchain has been explored as part of the energy transition (Ahl et al., 2020), (Creyts & Trbovich, 2018).The Brooklyn microgrid serves as the first successful pilot project for blockchain enabled peer-to-peer trading of energy (Mengelkamp et al., 2018). Blockchain facilitates the interconnectedness of distributed energy systems through IoT devices in the energy internet ecosystem (Sun et al., 2018), (Hosseinian et al., 2020). In the EV charging infrastructure, the peer-to-peer energy trading through blockchain platform enables prosumers and private owners to share their surplus energy generation for EV charging without a third-party intermediary. This enables autonomy to the users in choosing from multiple energy suppliers at a competitive price, secure platform and real-time EV power demand (Kim, 2019), (Zaheer, 2018).
eMotorWerks is among a host of companies, in the U.S and elsewhere, using blockchain to facilitate electric vehicle charging to alleviate charging anxiety (eMotorWerks, 2017). Meanwhile, the power company Innogy implemented blockchain technology to authenticate and manage the billing process in Germany (Shepard, 2017). Blockchain can facilitate the authentication and validation of billing through its smart contract function. Smart contracts are “lines of code written in the blockchain and automatically execute when predetermined terms and conditions are met” (Buterin, 2014), (Watanabe et al., 2016). Its role in the charging infrastructure is rapidly increasing with its implementation in battery management (Florea & Taralunga, 2020), secure communication with its environment (Kobashi, 2020), (Gai et al., 2020), energy trading from distributed and decentralised energy sources (Kim, 2019), (Qian et al., 2020), (Zhou et al., 2019) to initiatives to track the cobalt mined for EV batteries from the Democratic Republic of Congo (Anonymous, 2019).