Page 81 - North American Clean Energy March April 2018 Issue

computing energy consumption lean; allowing open access for market participants at all scales; and ensuring su cient governance and oversight to address regulatory concerns.
Whether Bitcoin’s volatile value surges back up to its December peak by the time you’re reading this article is anyone’s guess. As for blockchain in the energy sector, there’s much to watch and be cautiously excited about.
Peter Bronski leads marketing and communications for Energy Web Foundation, a nonpro t cofounded by Rocky Mountain Institute and Grid Singularity, developing an open-source blockchain platform speci cally for the energy sector in concert with a network of a liate partners. He is also the founder of In ection Point Agency, and an alumnus of Rocky Mountain Institute and Panasonic.
En| ergy Web Foundation | www.energyweb.org
speak? Reconsider Tesla’s South Australia virtual power plant, expected to ultimately include some 50,000 households. at sounds like a large number... until you consider where the grid is going. Analyst Gartner estimates there were ~8.4 billion IoT devices in use in 2017, and McKinsey forecasts that number to grow to 30 billion by 2020. Look at smart thermostats in particular. As of September 2017, U.S. utility “bring your own thermostat” programs alone had more than 2 million smart thermostat installations, expected to triple to 6 million by 2024. Analyst Navigant forecasts the global smart thermostat market will reach $4.4 billion by 2025 (up from $1.1 billion in 2016).
As renewable energy continues to displace conventional generation,
and as we connect millions—and eventually, billions—of grid-interactive customer devices and technologies with exible electricity loads to
the grid, how will utilities and grid operators manage and balance all those resources and assets? at's where the power of blockchain really shines.
Blockchain for the Energy Sector
From streamlining utility billing programs; to increasing the transparency and lowering the transaction costs of certi cates
of origin markets (e.g., renewable energy certi cates); to enabling
open and fair market access for all people, organizations, and devices, regardless of resource size; to unlocking opportunities for peer-to-peer (P2P) and machine-to-machine (M2M) energy transactions, blockchain’s attributes are transformational and make it especially well-suited to a wide range of use cases.
But in a blockchain-powered energy future, the right platform design will be critical: able to handle high transaction volumes per second while keeping
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