THIS IS IT!:
The blockchain is coming to Australia’s electricity grid. On 25 August, a group of neighbours will test a system to trade excess energy from solar panels between themselves using a blockchain to record the transactions.
Run by local start-up PowerLedger, the trial at a retirement village in the city of Busselton, Western Australia, is another sign of the energy industry’s growing curiosity about the technology.
A blockchain is a cryptographically secure ledger of every transaction made in a system, stored across every computer in its network. As every computer has a continually updating copy of the ledger, no central authority is in control. Instead, the computers essentially monitor each other to prevent fraud. It began as the driving force behind the cryptocurrency bitcoin, but is now being explored as a tool for an array of real-world industries.
Residents on the west coast of Australia see 300 days of sunshine per year and rooftop solar panels are growing in popularity, says PowerLedger co-founder Jemma Green. Rather than sell excess energy back to the power company, the blockchain will allow residents to trade directly with the people around them, with the ledger keeping track of transactions.
Solar sales
“Consumers want to take control of their energy generation and consumption,” she says. “We want to show that this tech is so simple to use that anyone could use it.”
Energy meters at 20 households plus a clubhouse in Busselton will be fitted with Raspberry Pi mini-computers to track their energy usage. Homeowners can decide who and how much to sell their excess renewable energy to, with each transaction logged on the blockchain.
This first two-month trial is a practice run to ensure the technology works; no energy will actually be traded. Real deployments are scheduled for next year in Perth and Victoria.
Green says she was inspired by a similar project in Brooklyn called TransActive Grid. More than 100 buildings have been enrolled in that project, says LO3, the company behind TransActive Grid. It is looking into starting trials in Europe and Africa.
“I think that there are going to be hundreds of blockchain energy companies springing up in the next couple of years,” says Lawrence Orsini, founder of LO3 Energy. “It’s going to be a really interesting time in the energy space.”