Energy Blockchain

Overview Grid+ spun out of, and is owned by, New York blockchain development house ConsenSys.  ConsenSys, which uses blockchain technology to create applications in many different fields, identified the opportunity to create a solution for the energy space.  The goals of Grid+ are to demonstrate production-ready blockchain-based energy solutions at scale in competitive commercial environments in order to enable the transactive grid of the future and prove the advantages of Ethereum over incumbent technologies. To get started, Grid+’s strategy is to become an energy retailer in Texas and to win customers by offering energy savings compared to the incumbents.  They will use their own hardware solution for energy management combined with efficiencies from trading using Ethereum.  Their hardware solution is called the Intelligent Agent.  It is a computer that basically pays for the customer’s electricity use in real time by reading from the smart meter. The Intelligent Agent then reads

What is an ICO?  An ICO is an initial coin offering.  The New York Times   recently described ICOs like this: "Imagine that a friend is building a casino and asks you to invest. In exchange, you get chips that can be used at the casino’s tables once it’s finished. Now imagine that the value of the chips isn’t fixed, and will instead fluctuate depending on the popularity of the casino, the number of other gamblers and the regulatory environment for casinos. Oh, and instead of a friend, imagine it’s a stranger on the internet who might be using a fake name, who might not actually know how to build a casino, and whom you probably can’t sue for fraud if he steals your money and uses it to buy a Porsche instead. That’s an I.C.O." ICOs are kind of like blockchain-based Initial Public Offerings (IPO) or crowd-funding campaigns.  The IPO analogy works because, with an ICO, the company offers tokens or coins in exchange for some value, somewhat similar to an IPO where people buy s

Power Ledger is building an energy blockchain platform to connect all of the players of the energy ecosystem together - prosumers, consumers, market operators, utilities, etc. They want to “enable interoperability between diverse market management/pricing mechanisms and units of electricity (kWh) by way of pre-purchased tokens.”  Here's my take on what they are up to. Business Model / Offering Power Ledger's offering is a blockchain-based platform that facilitates participation by “all” parties in the energy ecosystem, called the Platform. Utilities and other 3rd-party businesses that will facilitate trading on the platform are called Application Hosts. Examples of Application Hosts include energy retailers, property managers, and EV-charging businesses. Participants are the consumers or non-Application Hosts and the users. There will or can be an unlimited number of applications that run on the Power Ledger Platform. The first, and only one currently available, is FuseBox

Drift has gotten a lot of press recently. Who are they and what are they building? This is my take - leave me a comment to let me know what I missed or what you think. Overview Drift (formerly Wovn Energy) is a startup out of Seattle founded in 2015. Drift officially launched in New York City as an energy services company in May 2017. About 20% of residential customers in NY get their energy from an independent company, and with all of the REV-related work going on, it seems like it could be a good place to be for them. The founders are: Co-founder, CEO - Greg Robinson, UW Seattle ‘09 (physics). One other previous job at Quester Energy Systems (a startup he helped co-found in 2009 for solar tracking systems with “wovyn” technology) Co-founder, CTO - Ed McKenzie - Cornell U ‘02 (operations research). Former Google Maps SW engineer/test, Microsoft SW engineer/test, Questar Energy Systems. Currently, it looks like they have around 10 or so employees. Offering / Business Mode

I recently had the opportunity to attend a 2-day design thinking workshop led by IBM (particularly Jos Roling and Peter Patterson ) on the topic of  blockchain applications in the energy industry .  Despite the formal process, it was incredibly insightful and informative. Amazingly, we were able to get in the room - for 2 days! - the key people who really need to be involved if you're actually going to be able to make a difference in the energy industry.  We had: - the Market Operator - the Local Distribution Company - the Distributed Energy Resource (DER) provider - the Payment Experts - the Blockchain Developers and SMEs We had a very productive 2-day session focused on identifying and defining the problems in the energy industry that can be solved by an energy blockchain and the applications that it can facilitate.  We brainstormed, we argued, we learned.  There were a lot of sticky notes used. You can't come up with  solutions that will make a difference in the

In a previous post , I talked about the differences between distributed ledgers and blockchains. Another somewhat controversial topic in this space is the debate around public versus private blockchains.  Grid+ , a startup attempting to make it possible for consumers to participate directly in energy markets, has a recent blog post called "No Country for Private Blockchains", in which they articulate a good argument for the public blockchain.  They are deploying their solution on Ethereum and feel that the public blockchain approach helps to spread the cost of the shared infrastructure, makes it more secure, and increases value by ensuring that state changes are on the public chain.  Another energy blockchain application startup, PowerLedger , in Australia seems to be taking a hybrid approach using a public+consortium blockchain - for now at least.  Given the high degree of privacy and security that is required to participate in the energy industry today, it's an importa

What's the difference between distributed ledgers and blockchains?  "Bits on Blocks" published a brief introduction on this topic earlier this year.  The key takeaways from that article are pretty high level but still helpful when thinking about this.  For example, this: If you want to include all the initiatives going on, use the term “distributed ledgers”. If you mean blockchains, where unrelated transactions are bundled into blocks, which are chained together using hashes and (in most cases) broadcast to all participating entities for batch processing, use “blockchains”. If you like acronyms, use “DLT”: Distributed Ledger Technology Colin Pratt also provided some very interesting detail on this concept along with a discussion on taxonomy in general in his blog post "Thoughts on the Taxonomy of Blockchains & Distributed Ledger Technologies." Colin highlights that Bitcoin's blockchain has some key features that really illustrate what makes it dif

Blockchain technology will play a key role in the transactive grid of the future. A blockchain is an immutable, distributed, shared ledger that makes it possible for energy and energy-related financial transactions to be securely recorded and settled. Not all blockchains are created equal, however. A blockchain that would be able to support the complex services and interactions fundamental to managing energy grids and markets has very specific requirements related to its consensus and storage models, and services for identity, access control, and contracts. Before we can define what those requirements are, it’s important to first understand the use cases and applications that the energy blockchain would support.  A report from late 2016 by the German agency, dena , provides a very good overview of several key use cases.  They conducted a survey of German energy executives which provides great insight into how blockchain can and is being used by the energy industry. This excerpt fr

Blockchain has become a buzzword, unfortunately. Blockchain has been touted as the silver bullet that will solve problems in almost every industry. This is problematic, because, when a new technology gets this kind of hype, people will start to apply the technology in ways that don't necessarily take advantage of its core strengths, leading to disappointment when the results aren't as great as hoped. And then the technology gets blamed and people use it as an opportunity to point out how the technology isn't ready or isn't as great as everyone says. Startups will pop up and fail, leading to more speculation about the technology not being ready or as good as hoped. Startups that have real, good solutions, will suffer from the mistakes others make. Jon Evans published an interesting perspective on this in May 2017 in an article titled "Blockchains are the new Linux, not the new Internet." He makes an interesting argument for thinking about this more rati