Blockchain for Electric Vehicles Energy Trading: Requirements, Opportunities, and Challenges

Today’s technologies, techniques, and systems leveraged for managing energy trading operations in electric vehicles fall short in providing operational transparency, immutability, fault tolerance, traceability, and trusted data provenance features. They are centralized and vulnerable to the single point of failure problem, and less trustworthy as they are prone to the data modifications and deletion by adversaries. In this paper, we present the potential advantages of blockchain technology to manage energy trading operations between electric vehicles as it can offer data traceability, immutability, transparency, audit, security, and confidentiality in a fully decentralized manner. We identify and discuss the essential requirements for the successful implementation of blockchain technology to secure energy trading operations among electric vehicles. We present a detailed discussion on the potential opportunities offered by blockchain technology to secure the energy trading operations of electric vehicles. We discuss several blockchain-based research projects and case studies to highlight the practicability of blockchain technology in electric vehicles energy trading. Finally, we identify and discuss open challenges in fulfilling the requirements of electric vehicles energy trading applications.