Blockchain facilitated energy exchange for open-grid applications
meterBlock is a collaborative project that aims to provide a decentralised platform to facilitate the governance of electrical energy consumption and production, measured and controlled by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) connected power meters. The goal of the project is to build a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) prototype device running on the Ethereum blockchain to facilitate this energy governance. The project commenced on the 1st of July 2018 and will run to completion eight weeks later on the 26th of August 2018.
A primary use of this technology is to provide a platform of energy exchange between producers and consumers within self-sustaining micro-grids, trading surplus energy between one another. Full scale implementation involves replacing the current national grid’s management system, whereby each individual entity can act as both a consumer and producer, governed by the blockchain, enabling a novel, trustless, decentralised, energy exchange marketplace. These entities could include, but are not limited to: pure producer - such as power utilities (Eskom) - pure consumer - such as manufacturing plants or traditional households - or producer/consumer - such as gated communities, households, hospitals, shopping centres etc. with installed sources of renewable energy.
The project will run on an Ethereum based blockchain (such as Quorum) and will implement the tokenization of an energy unit through an adaptation of the ERC20 token standard. meterBlock lays the foundations for future collaborative work when taken to its logical extreme at a national grid level. This report discusses the inherent issues that must be considered before full scale implementation of a DLT-based system can be put into production. Some of these issues relate to the practicalities and complexities of implementation when considering application at a national grid level, but can also be extended to the legal and regulatory factors and their broader economic impacts.
A link to the final implemenation report can be found here
