The Tesla outside in the drive is fully charged, you don‘t have any plans to go any further than the supermarket today, so the battery is available to sell its energy back to the grid and deposit tokens in your energy wallet if the electricity grid requires power.
Energy and electricity, in particular, are vital to our society.
Westinghouse, a rival to Thomas Edison’s company, invented AC power and built a big hydropower plant at Niagara Falls to supply electricity to Buffalo, NY.
It does, however, rely on large, expensive and centralized power stations fueled by coal, natural gas, hydro or nuclear.
Now we have a new paradigm: In a transition to a decarbonized future, we have lots of Distributed Energy Resources to deal with.
The rest of the time, they sit in the depot to serve as a giant battery for the local power grid.
Balancing all the loads from different inputs and outputs is much more difficult in a distributed system and requires a lot of AI, data analytics and some sort of transparent, accessible, trusted and un-manipulable accounting system.
BlockLab.nl teamed up with S&P Global Commodity Insights, a giant in the field of commodity trading and analytics, to create Distro, an AI-based trading platform to buy and sell energy from a solar power microgrid on the roofs of buildings within the port complex.
It uses high-frequency trading and blockchain accounting to drive down user costs by 11%, produce returns up 14% and reduce emissions of CO2, according to an in-house analysis released October 5, 2021.
The Port of Rotterdam backed the project in 2018 with a small amount of “pizza money,” with the clear direction that it had to be a practical and realizable project, not some vaporware.
“The platform has hosted 20 million blockchain-validated, cleared and settled transactions.
They are working on scaling this technology to larger projects.
Another niche use is “Shore Power.” Docked ships need variable power, usually using diesel generators, and produce fine dust air pollution.
Australia’s Powerledger is pushing forward with decentralized markets so that renewable energy generation, storage and purchasing power are harnessed in an optimal way.
Powerledger‘s uGrid software is being used in Thailand in project T77 to trade rooftop solar power between an international school, apartment complex, shopping center and dental hospital in Bangkok.
Launched in 2015, The Sun Exchange‘s micro-leasing marketplace in South Africa brings individual and corporate energy investors to off-grid energy development.
ECO2 Ledger uses blockchain technology to make carbon credit data more reliable and traceable in the voluntary carbon market in China, where individuals can track their carbon emissions on the MyCarbon app and trade with those who need carbon credits.
The production, trade, distribution and consumption of renewable energy can be electronically documented and tracked with this method, creating carbon credits for verifiable carbon generation.
Mercados Eléctricos16 , an electricity trading corporation operating across Mexico and Central America, is executing a pilot platform to assess a business case for the technical feasibility of a blockchain-based regional carbon credit trading marketplace.
He explains, “We utilize that energy, convert it into electricity and mine Bitcoin.” The company’s product is a mobile data center that can be put on a gas site and use surplus gas to generate power — a neat trick.
“There is a lot of energy in the power grid that is wasted.
They are building around a dozen more each month and are hooking their data centers up to renewable microgrids.
“What I mean by that is renewable energy such as wind or solar requires a consistent user of power in order to be profitable.
Couple that with IoT, AI, machine learning, big data and other technological innovations, as well as much more granular user control, a decentralized financial and accounting system will be required to ensure transparency, security and accountability.
Julian is a professional journalist and copywriter, specializing in the environment, technology and business.
Through long-form features, thoughtful analysis, and a little humor and satire, we illustrate how the implementation of this technology is affecting the lives of countless people — today, right now, not at some distant point in the future.