n New York state, neighbors are testing their ability to sell solar energy to one another using blockchain technology. In Austria, the country’s largest utility conglomerate, Wien Energie, is taking part in a blockchain trial focused on energy trading with two other utilities. Meanwhile in Germany, the power company Innogy is running a pilot to see if blockchain technology can authenticate and manage the billing process for autonomous electric-vehicle charging stations.
Blockchain has grabbed the attention of the heavily regulated power industry as it braces for an energy revolution in which both utilities and consumers will produce and sell electricity. Blockchain could offer a reliable, low-cost way for financial or operational transactions to be recorded and validated across a distributed network with no central point of authority. As in the financial services industry, this capability has prompted some people to explore whether blockchain may one day replace a portion of utilities’ businesses by doing away with the need for intermediaries altogether. But that view is too extreme and simplistic.
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What is more likely to happen is that blockchain will become part of the answer to updating and improving centralized, legacy systems with a distributed hybrid system made up of a patchwork of both large power plants and microgrids powered by distributed energy resources such as solar power. Such a decentralized energy system would be capable of delivering efficient, reliable, and, in many cases, renewable energy.
This coming shift is prompting the industry to focus on blockchain’s potential to make peer-to-peer energy trading a reality, though it’s unclear how soon the nascent technology can be scalable. For example, in a blockchain microgrid project in Brooklyn, N.Y., each participant trading electricity had to invest in a computer with a blockchain “node” in order for their homes with solar panels to be able to sell power to neighbors. The blockchain network manages and records the transactions with little human interaction. The “nodes” in the computers are needed to validate and share the information to minimize the possibility of downtime or interference with the data. The more data that needs to be bundled into “blocks” and passed along, the more computing power they need.
But it’s possible that blockchain may one day enable the development of an integrated trading system that would permit businesses to trade their option to use electricity during a given time frame. For example, a factory could sell five minutes of unused power during a down time to a different factory that needs the additional power. Trading grid flexibility in this way could provide large efficiency benefits for grid operator
