KNOW YOUR DEVICE (KYD)

KYD Procedures for solar dataloggers interacting with the SolarCoin Blockchain.

In order to do accurate datalogging for solar energy, you need to KNOW YOUR DEVICE.

What does KNOW mean?

A field datalogger is classified as a device that lives in the field, usually at grid-edge. It was hashed in the blockchain and helped through the birth process by a calibration datalogger.

Knowing the solar energy kWh production is actually easy in practice at the cloud datalogging level on the internet. But it is really difficult to verify the provenance of the logged data. Many service providers allow solar installations to produce outputs about their environments inside the provider silo. For example location data, amount of energy produced, instantaneous values of voltage, current, and power. The data points, along with secondary environmental variables are logged to MYSQL or similar databases that are usually wrapped by the datalogger and cloud login providers silo only. No external sharing of the data logged (or very minimal) is allowed outside that service providers silo. In addition, there is no external audit trail about that providers silo.

But until now, this has been sufficient for knowing the data that is produced by a solar plant, usually just inside the service providers silo. But with additional services that are now starting to be built on top of the energy production layer that are inherently dependent on the energy produced (and sharing information out to the open-blockchain environment), the actual provenance of the data logged becomes a critical point. In addition there are increasing external security threats to internet connected devices like spoofing, hacking and mimicing the solar data that is produced. It is therefore becoming increasingly important to do KYD calibration inside blockchains.

External rewards such as SolarCoin, and other projects may actually rely on the fact that the energy provenance at the datalogger grid-edge is actually produced at the said point of solar energy production.

What is a calibration datalogger?

A calibration datalogger is an inherently trusted device. What is trusted? In this context trusted means being able to independently verify the data both ON-CHAIN and OFF-CHAIN. This need creates additional steps for the setup, and maintenance of the calibration datalogger.

The calibration datalogger will need to be reviewed and certified by the SolarCoin Council. The chip parts list known and safely recorded. A hash of the chips serial numbers is agreed upon in an OFF-CHAIN secure environment.

The SolarCoin Council maintains the calibration dataloggers procedure, and, information that can verify the hashes of the existence of the calibration datalogger. Finally, the calibration datalogger is used to produce field dataloggers.

Unfortunately, the SolarCoin Council becomes a central authority for the calibration of the calibration dataloggers. BUT, it is hoped that the SolarCoin Council can also grow through the process of decentralizing this authority outwards to the greater SolarCoin community.