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In Prémian, in southern France, a blockchain project developed by Sunchain is providing six consumers with solar energy and certification transactions – which also involves the local distribution system operator Enedis.
A community of homeowners, small businesses and public bodies in the French village of Prémian, in the southern province of Occitania, shares the solar energy generated by a photovoltaic system under a self-consumption regime administered by the local municipality.
Under the system, transactions between community members are resistant to fraud and transparent thanks to a dedicated blockchain technology.
The project is the first of its kind, says its developer, Sunchain, a spin-off of the French independent photovoltaic consultant Tecsol.
According to the information provided to magazine pv the project has a 28 kW coverage on a building in the municipality that supplies electricity to six consumers: a school building, a post office, another municipal building, a cultural center, a private house and a bakery – all of them behind a substation public for the transformation of electricity from medium to low voltage.
The economic model of the project is based on an investment of € 52,000 by the municipality, which provides free energy to the six consumers. Participants contribute to the operating costs of the plant through a membership fee to an ad hoc association that transfers it to the municipality. Excess energy is sold by the municipality to the local Enercoop renewable energy supplier at a rate of € 0.04 / kWh.
Four-phase system
The sharing of electricity, which is transported through the public electricity grid, takes place at each time step, according to the rules established by the members of the community. Data on consumption and production are recorded on a blockchain platform developed by Sunchain, which certifies them.
The technology works in four phases: the power data is collected from the smart meters via blockchain; they are registered in the blockchain and smart contracts allocate energy among consumers; the results of the sharing are communicated to the operator of the Enedis distribution system through a protected interface; and Enedis charges the consumer for the traditional network consumption minus the share of solar energy allocated to it.
This token-free blockchain solution, the company said, is not related to any mining or cryptocurrency process and is based on the open source platform HypedLedger, which is developed and managed by an international consortium of IBM, Intel and Fujitsu, among others. Architecture, designed specifically for the supply of renewable energy, in itself meets a requirement for very low energy consumption.
