Blockchain-Powered Coordination Promises to Boost Efficiency for Utility Companies

The use of blockchain to transfer data from point A to point B has led to this once obscure piece of technology becoming a core unit of the institutional bandwagon. The energy and utilities sector is one that is fairly resilient to technological change, but greatly benefits from it. BizTech outlines the key properties of distributed ledgers that hold the key to bringing a great degree of efficiency to this sector as a whole, December 17, 2019.

Why Energy Companies Benefit From Blockchain

For anyone that has followed current affairs in crypto for long enough, hearing “energy” and “blockchain” in the same sentence automatically diverts our mind towards the “Bitcoin wastes energy” narrative; this time, it’s something more refreshing and positive regarding the utility of blockchain in energy management.

From tokenizing money to tokenizing shoes, we have come a long way; the next step on the list is to tokenize units of energy. Doing this allows energy companies to better track usage, wastage, send units from suppliers to customers. Basically, data becomes more accurate and transfers become efficient.

A few more far-reaching benefits include using a distributed ledger to track the origin of energy (whether solar, thermal, wind, etc) as well as facilitating peer-to-peer transfers from one home grid to another. In a future where people have solar panels and energy generating equipment at home, each house is effectively turned into a microgrid, all of which is interconnected on a blockchain.

Distributing the Energy Stack

It’s intriguing to read about the promise a decentralized, distributed future holds. Central banks are no longer in charge of nudging the economy in a particular direction – demand and supply become the ultimate economic forces. We no longer have massive thermal powered electricity plants – everyone has their own microgrids.

Outlier Ventures has a public report that highlights the intricacies of distributed energy management in depth. The basic conclusion from this report is that blockchains have far more use cases than we initially imagined.

Decentralizing energy never seemed like a viable option, but we now have projects like Power Ledger that are running pilots to try and make the energy industry more decentralized.