Innogy a renewable energy company with over 23 million customers in eleven European markets and one of the biggest gas/electricity retailers in Germany, the Netherlands and UK is experimenting with IOTA.
IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger which doesn’t use blockchain, instead it uses DAG (directed acyclic graph). In essence this means that each person/machine that wants to execute a transaction on the network first needs to validate two previous transactions. The network itself is known as the tangle, which is much more scalable than blockchain and has no transactions fees. IOTA could be the next big thing in the IoT world and allows machine to machine payments.
Imagine smart electric meters interconnecting with your electric car, solar panels,... negotiating prices to sell you’re excess solar energy to the network and start charging your car during off-peak hours.
Or let your smart electric meter pay in real time for the exact amount of energy you are currently using. No more monthly electricity bills and you can follow up you’re costs in real time.
Does this sound futuristic? The technology is already there, but a lot of development still needs to be done. Once mature, adoption will take many years. Even tough interesting times are ahead for iot and IOTA.
