World’s Largest Software Company Using Ethereum To Supply Electricity in Texas

By Kapil Gauhar

A blockchain startup, Grid+ is operated by ConsenSys which is the largest blockchain software company in the world currently operated by Ethereum co-creator Joseph Lubin who has successfully begun supplying electricity to its clients in Texas.

With the use of one of a kind hardware gateway system as well as a blockchain solution, the startup can distribute renewable electricity such as wind and solar energy to the consumers throughout the US on the Ethereum mainnet. Joseph Lubin said, “Groundbreaking milestone. The tireless Grid+ team has begun supplying power to their first four customers.”

The Significance of Decentralised Energy Distributors

The software and hardware stack of the Grid+ are used for processing electricity payments in real time letting consumers to programmatically sell and buy the power with a function known as Smart Agents.

For large properties such as factories which consume quite a lot electricity regularly, it’s possible to process several paments within a short period to purchase as well as use the energy which they need without obtaining an abundant supply of energy.

With the help of renewable energy sources, it remains a daunting challenge for grid operators to maximise their supply. Last year in Chile when local solar power plants overproduced solar energy, regional grid operators had no other way of storing as well as distributing energy throughout the country and had to give its supply of the electricity for free.

The Grid+ and ConsenSys team said, “Through this experience, ConsenSys identified the opportunity to form Grid+, which will build natively Ethereum-based utilities in deregulated markets. Grid+ will demonstrate production ready blockchain-based energy solutions at scale in competitive commercial environments to enable the transactive grid of the future and prove the advantages of Ethereum over incumbent technologies.”

Off-Chain and Scaling Payment Processing

Since the last nine months, an increasing number of dApps have begun to use platforms like Raiden and 0x that focus on lessening the burden on the Ethereum mainnet to maximise the transaction capacity. This is quite useful for Ethereum even if it scales to thousands of transactions per second in the coming time.