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They may be the long-awaited precondition for a more prosperous and inclusive economy. Retrieved 10 May Retrieved 24 March Retrieved from " https: Ethereum Companies based in Brooklyn. Articles containing potentially dated statements from December All articles containing potentially dated statements.
Views Read Edit View history. This page was last edited on 4 April , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Brooklyn , New York City [2] , U. One of the assets of blockchain technology is database management, which is transparent and cannot be violated. This asset could be used in systems that need certifications and traceability.
The idea is that energy producers, suppliers or distributors electricity, gas, fuel, heat, cold … are pushed to promote energy efficiency actions actively. Each action indicating the amount of energy savings has to be described and filed, and can then be controlled by the authorities. White certificates are tradable For more details: This system is quite analogous to the concept of CO2 emissions trading. These certificates are instruments supposed to guarantee a specified amount of energy savings, emission, or renewable energy consumption has been achieved.
Each certificate has to be unique and traceable, guaranteeing that the impact of the related action has not been accounted for elsewhere. Therefore, authorities have to track the evolution of these certificates in registers. It has been noticed that authorities have a lot on their hands and sometimes lack the time to control filed actions and work on the evolution of the mechanism corresponding regulations are often revised , in addition to managing the registers.
The benefit is for all players, since they would be able to concentrate on actions contributing to the energy transition. There is no denying that there is still much to be done in the field since regulation weighs heavily on any innovation.
Each country has its own national registers for the White Certificates, which meet different rules depending on the geographical location, which entails enormous costs for the utilities. For instance, if a utility has wind turbines in Belgium, solar panels in Wallonia, and biomass in Brussels, it must have 3 different national White Certificates management registers, and as many dedicated teams and therefore the costs rocket.
Blockchain would here be a perfect example of application to disintermediate all these actors, and thus reduce the risk and the costs, except that the main actor is the State, and therefore this implies to change the regulation first.
The stock exchange operator, Nasdaq, unveiled in May a service that lets solar power generators sell certificates thanks to its Linq blockchain service for more details: In this system, the solar panels have to be connected to the Internet with technology provided by Filament, a Nevada-based blockchain start-up. Blockchain technology may ease the billing process for utilities and reduce energy bills for consumers thanks to smart metering.
The electricity smart meter is the keystone between suppliers and customers of the smart grid, and concentrates all the transaction, confidence and security stakes associated with an ever more intelligent and flexible energy. Smart meters associated with the transparency of blockchain create an environment where transactions are open and secure:. A smart grid network supported by blockchain technology would ensure an efficient local relationship between production and consumption of renewable energy.
Participants could publicly track their energy usage and production, and sell any unused energy to other participants. They would also have the ability to reduce their energy bills by making more informed purchasing decisions, avoiding consumption peaks or switching into a lower subscription. Smart meters and blockchain technology would ensure a simplified billing process efficiency, transparency and faster switching times.
A blockchain solution identifying where the energy is coming from, at what unit price and any mark-up passed to the consumer would result in more competitive pricing and in better integrity from public perception.
It is called BlockCharge. Following the same principle that roaming for telecommunications, it would allow electric vehicles to charge anywhere with the help of a smart plug , and to be billed for the electricity they used in a simple, common, and blockchain-based way. The EVs would interact automatically with stations and the electricity payment process would be autonomous. In the energy sector, we are witnessing the development of prosumer characters that is to say individual consumers that are also producing energy homes with solar panels for instance.
In that respect, blockchain technology represents an opportunity for a wider development of those behaviors by increasing the number of people who could buy and sell energy directly with a high degree of autonomy.
Indeed, as said in the previous paragraph, blockchain technology should entail major changes since it allows transactions to be carried out directly from peer to peer. No third party intermediaries are required.
In theory, we can imagine a market place where consumers exchange their own production without needing energy companies to organize the transactions. It creates a shift from centralized structures banks, trading platforms, energy companies towards a decentralized system peer-to-peer transactions.
It would reduce cost and speed up processes. The system would thus become more flexible. Of course, in that model, energy companies are still needed to organize the transfer of energy.
Transactive Grid, the project of the LO3 platform and ConsenSys, has become a quite famous example of the possible application of blockchain to energy with its pilot experiment in Brooklyn, NYC for more details: The objective of the experiment lies in the re-appropriation by citizens of their energy production, by the establishment of mini-grids, that is to say, mini autonomous energy communities. For this purpose, sensors record the history of the energy generation at a specific point, and immediately record it on blockchain Ethereum.
Smart contracts can then govern the rules of use of this energy, and of course the tariffs of producers. We could thus imagine, like the microgrid in Brooklyn, a proliferation of local decentralized and autonomous microgrids.
In local communities, single persons with a single solar panel could thus participate in the end user market. Moreover, we can easily conceive a system where people with individual solar panel no longer feed their excess energy into the grid but market all their production.
List of potential use cases and associated examples. This list is not exhaustive, as blockchain technology makes it possible to increase efficiency in processes and improve transparency, so it can be considered in numerous applications. Its use will depend on its adoption by the greater mass.
At this stage, all projects remain pilots to validate the public interest. Figure 7 — Potential use case and examples. None of the energy companies currently developing blockchain applications have moved beyond the concept or pilot stage yet. It appears that those models are difficult to put into practice. Indeed, the actual technology lacks of maturity and is complex in its development and implementation, in the energy sector in particular. Moreover, barriers such as legal and regulatory requirements that blockchain projects must comply with are obstacles that still have to be overcome.