Once upon a time, a single electric utility would send electricity in one direction to many customers. But the grid is evolving so that millions of devices will buy and sell, exchange and share electricity, system services, and information instantaneously in a multitude of directions.
U.S. energy labs have begun developing systems that use blockchain to manage those transactions.
“We’ve got a really interesting opportunity here,” said Tony Markel, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “We see the electricity grid going through a pretty interesting transition, this whole sector going from having a lot of things be controlled from a central perspective, moving out, to having a lot of distributed energy resources and having a lot of—having millions to billions of devices sitting out there on the power grid.
“And we’re going to be in a state where we don’t know what all those things are doing. They may all have different objectives. And, so, I think where we’re headed with trying to understand blockchain, and building the knowledge base around blockchain, is seeing that future state and knowing that we need a way to develop and ensure trust across that entire very complex, highly distributed environment.”