With electricity grids evolving so that millions of devices can buy and sell, exchange and share electricity in a multitude of directions, United States energy labs have begun developing systems that use blockchain to manage those transactions, Forbes reports.
“We’ve got a really interesting opportunity here,” National Renewable Energy Laboratory researcher Tony Markel said.
“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.
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“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.”
While the term blockchain is most commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, which rely on the technology’s capacity for trust, the future grid will require a reliable hyper ledger that is transparent to multiple parties.
“Blockchain … is a distributed digital record of actions agreed upon and performed by multiple parties,” blockchain expert Pete Tseronis told Forbes.
“Don’t confuse it with the whole crypto thing yet, folks. But it provides mathematical proof about the state of data, and it’s commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, but cryptography and consensus mechanisms underpin this. At the end of the day, it’s to build a trusted relationship.”
Southern California Edison is among the utilities keeping a close watch on the US Government’s experiments with blockchain as their section of the grid changes.
“We’re seeing a lot more complexity, a lot more devices. In fact, it’s kind of exploding, if you really think about it,” SCE data scientist and senior engineer Anthony James said.
“Inverters, electric vehicles, connected buildings—data is going to be utilised a lot more, moving from static realms to more real-time applications. And, so, there seems to be a very good, very strong fit, a compelling fit with blockchain worth exploring. Data integrity and trust were the two capabilities that came to mind initially.
Blockchain may also help manage cyber risk.
“The grid is just changing,” cybersecurity researcher Dave Benton said.
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“It’s evolving to meet the new demands of new distributed energy. More wind, more solar, more batteries. And we can’t do that journey without knowing how security is going to be impacted and how security is going to need to change to adopt these new technologies.
“So, in our role at the lab, we need to look at what the grid is going to look like in two to three years and how we’re going to accommodate this. And if a technology like blockchain is that glue or fabric that could help put this all together, that’s absolutely where we want to go.”
Read the full article at Forbes.
