[ad_1]
In the second quarter of 2019, we will get one step closer to a smarter electricity grid when the Energy Web Foundation's (EWF) energy-sector blockchain goes live. The EWF, which has raised over $ 20m in funding since its launch, includes 12 of the world's largest energy companies, including Shell, Centrica and E.ON.
All of the energy companies needed to generate electricity at a central power station. But now the problem is becoming intelligent, because the situation is more complex.
It has incorporated intermittent energy sources such as wind turbines, plus an increasing number of consumer-owned power generation and storage devices. It has extra significant demand from electric cars. For real-time energy-use data. In short, the system is decentralizing, and the number of transactions will be processed quickly, cheaply and securely is increasing. Many argue that is the best way to handle this new paradigm is blockchain.
Like bitcoin, the EWF blockchain is a distributed ledger. Unlike bitcoin, that led is not just for tracking payments; users can also code applications that run on top of it. For the energy industry, that's why the foundation prefers to think about their blockchains as a globally decentralized computer.
This "computer" will be open-source and maintained by energy-market participants around the world – a platform with which they can innovate as they see fit. Initially, the EWF estimates that 70 per cent of its affiliated companies are waiting to see how others use the tech, while 20 per cent are building pilots. Ten percent, however, will be developing products to sell into the marketplace after the blockchain is live. This group includes nimble startups as well as major entities such as Singapore Power.
According to Jesse Morris, the EWF's chief commercial officer, the immediate raft of applications. Right now, when a solar power plant produces a unit of renewable energy, a second organization that information and produces a certificate that is translated into the marketplace and later verified by a third party. It's a complex system that is vulnerable to error.
If green energy sources automatically wrote their electricity to the blockchain, however, it would bring greater transparency and reliability. More significantly, it would also bring nuance. Right now, green energy certificates are not differentiated – one unit of green energy is treated in the same way as any other. A wind-power plant in an area where the grid is predominantly powered by coal or gas. The architecture that the EWF is developing includes an algorithm that estimates actual carbon offset based on location and certifies accordingly.
The next wave of applications, in Morris' estimation, will most likely concern electric vehicles (EVs). Today, if you have an EV, you have different accounts with different payment providers.
The fightback against the bitcoin energy guzzlers has begun
In a blockchain-based architecture, every EV would have a digital ID with a wallet attached to it. So when you want to charge your car, you would like to be hooked up. That also means that anyone who owns a charging station can connect it to that blockchain-based marketplace, enabling other people to use it, and making money in return.
In the longer term, the blockchain may also open up the possibility of peer-to-peer energy trading. As consumers increasingly start to produce their own power with, for example, rooftop solar panels, the blockchain's ability to process a large volume of transactions cheaply and securely could open up local-level markets in which we will be able to buy and sell energy to each other based on real-time price data.
Consumers are currently only able to "sell" electricity back to their suppliers in the form of reduced bills. There's a possible future, according to Morris, where "every single electricity-using, storing or producing devices – batteries, air conditioning units, solar panels – [will be] with other buildings, then with other buildings and then between the entire utility distribution networks. "
While in the energy blockchain space – startups in the field raised over $ 300m in funding in 2017 – there will be obstacles to realizing that future. It will depend on the wider penetration of technologies such as smart meters, which is only slightly more than a fifth of UK. in the whole of Austria.
But these issues are fixable. The EWF, for instance, says its blockchain at a medium-sized office building. That's because the algorithm that is verifying information being added to their blockchain using much less computational power.
What may prove the most significant bottleneck is simply the energy industry's aversion to risk.
"Innovation in the energy sector is like open heart surgery on a living patient," says Joanna Hubbard, Electron's chief commercial officer of energy-blockchain startup. "It goes to bits slower than anything else because we're looking at critical national infrastructure."
In 2019, blockchain will provide a way to bring about innovation while keeping the patient alive and healthy.
Charlie Burton is a senior commissioning editor at GQ
More great stories from WIRED
– Inside the dark web's biggest hitman-for-hire website
– How BMW's new electric powertrain torpedos Tesla
– Google is no longer the best company to work for in the UK
– How to make sense of the bitcoin's unrelenting death spiral
Get the best of WIRED in your inbox every Saturday with the WIRED Weekender newsletter
[ad_2]Source link
