Energy Blockchain

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...

Audrey Zibelman, former NYPSC chair, Jon Wellinghoff, former FERC chair, and others in the industry have described visions where distributed energy resources (DERs) are plentiful and active contributors to a dynamic and efficient grid of the future. Though the technical capabilities of DERs to provide valuable services to the grid have been proven, market and regulatory barriers exist which prevent DERs from being able to monetize the value they provide. Currently, the tools and processes in place in the industry to securely manage contracts, transactions, and settlements are not positioned to be applied to many small DERs and it would be prohibitively expensive to do so. A mechanism for efficiently, cost effectively, and securely managing the contracts, transactions, and settlement activities of many DER participants in near-real time is needed to make it practical for DERs to contribute to grid management on a large scale. There are several key elements that need to be...

I have spent more than 15 years working to advance distributed energy resources (DERs), at this point, and it's clear that DERs are technologically to the point where they have been proven time and time again and can be relied on like any other utility or grid assets.  However, it's still very difficult to monetize the value that DERs can provide because there are not mechanisms in place, in most energy markets, to compensate them for what they can do.  For startups that are trying to commercialize services that can be provided by distributed energy storage systems like orchestrated behind-the-meter load control and/or solar+storage, it's very frustrating to know that these products can perform as well as traditional utility grid assets, but can't be paid for doing so. The next area of innovation in clean energy must focus on solving this problem.  The technology barriers are not what they once were.  DER hardware and software are advanced enough to provide consis...