Iberdola Uses Blockchain, Proves That Energy Is Renewable

Iberdrola, a Spanish energy company of much repute, in association with Kutxabank has used blockchain technology to “guarantee” that the energy it supplies to its customers comes from 100 percent renewable sources. Kutxabank has an equity shareholding in Iberdrola. The experiment was carried out with the help of Energy Web Foundation distributed ledger technology (DLT), an open-sourced and scalable blockchain solution platform.

The company announced on Monday that it had undertaken an “experiment” wherein they used blockchain to track the origin of energy supplies, in real time, “from the generation asset to the point of consumption” at Kutxabank.

The energy supplied was produced from wind farms and a hydroelectricity plant, and utilized at the headquarters of Kutxabank, in the Basque Country, and Cajasur in Andalusia. Cajasur belongs to the Kutxabank Group.

Iberdrola believes that distributed ledger technology (DLT) will have significant uses in the energy sector, including cost efficiency, prioritization of energy distribution and others. The inclusion of blockchain ensures security and transparency because it is “permanently registered on the platform so that both parties can audit the results” they added.

Apart from offering renewable energy to the people with the help of blockchain, Iberdrola says it has also initiated the process of transactions of the energy without intermediaries between the interested parties.

On October 2018, the Ugandan Government partnered with a similar private firm to develop an extremely efficient blockchain based, green energy system in the country.

More recently, on the 10th of this month, the United States Department of Energy allotted $4.8 mil for research and development of areas in need of blockchain application in Fossil Power Generation.

The scenario seems to be changing more and more in favor of blockchain nowadays as we see it moving past just cryptocurrencies and fin tech firms and on to various other walks of life.

Rishma Banerjee

Rishma is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and has a special place in her life for sifting through all sorts of random trivia, thank you very much.