Blockchain in Energy Sector: What the Technology Promised and How Much It Delivered?

By Kapil Gauhar

The energy industry is slanting towards a distributed yet connected future. With this comes numerous digital optimization opportunities, be it the Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) or blockchain technology.

Accordingly, utilities are increasing their digital initiatives to stay competitive in the developing energy landscape. What’s more, the utility associations’ interest in blockchain is rising.

Blockchain Potential for Utilities

In the utility sector, blockchain technology has that potential to enable new methods to manage how energy is secured, distributed and accounted for. Utilities are testing the potential of blockchain for creating new business models across the world based on micro-transactions enabled by blockchain’s ability to make a trust between unknown peers.

These sort of disintermediated transactions develop the possibility of boosting the economic growth by leapfrogging the need to create large-scale centralized infrastructure for tracking commodity-related transaction or asset-related events and process payments.

One possible industry vision for the digital business is for utilities to be a provider of energy sharing economy platform. This platform can be managed by a single entity. In this centralized model platform, the provider is free to use a permissioned ledger-focused blockchain to track micro-energy transactions as well as orchestrate financial settlement.

This model will help be helpful in easier interaction with the digital distribution platform that is managed by IDNO (Independent Distributed Network Operator) that would validate technical feasibility of proposed energy trades and calculate delivery charges depending on the congestion prices.

Managing energy exchanges between consumers and prosumers and creating cryptographically verified distributed P2P energy exchange platforms are among the most continuous use-cases assessed in a few early trials across the globe.

Various instances of blockchain’s use in the utility area have been accounted for up until this point. Notwithstanding, those are in a trial and beginning period. Like this, they are for the most part utilized as signs of business potential or as technology feasibility pilots.

A Look Beyond the Hype

Early adopters must have sensible assumptions regarding what can be picked up by setting out on energy-related blockchain activities. This can, in some cases, be a challenge, particularly as blockchain’s journey continues to be jumbled by hype, inflated expectations, miscomprehension, misinformation and questionable prompt esteem.

Both the tech media and merchants have fuelled off base assumptions that blockchain is as of now being effectively deployed across the enterprises and that a bigger change is in progress.

This isn’t the case!

Truth to be told, as indicated by Gartner’s 2018 CIO Survey, just a single per cent of CIOs showed any sort of blockchain adoption inside their associations, and just eight per cent of CIOs were in momentary arranging or dynamic experimentation with blockchain.

Even though blockchain’s adoption is in the beginning stage, there’s still a strong indication that there will ultimately be an assortment of approaches to use this technology. With its promise of transforming transaction streams, better approaches of managing as well as operating distributed assets and operations, blockchain will continue to pick up gain traction in the utility sector. But utilities should oppose “fear of missing out” and must initially assess the disruptive nature of blockchain, evaluating whether this technology is promptly required for their organizations or not.