Elia and Powerledger to explore peer-to-peer energy trading on the blockchain
A memorandum of understanding between TSO Elia Group and Australian blockchain company Powerledger aims to investigate consumer flexibility.
The two companies intend to evaluate the benefits and challenges of implementing peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading using Elia Group’s traXes energy services platform together with Powerledger’s xGrid software platform for P2P trading.
As flexible consumption becomes increasingly important as levels of renewable energy increase, Elia Group’s ‘Consumer-Centric Market Design’ aims to facilitate the transition to a more flexible energy system by enabling energy service providers to provide their customers with better products and incentives thereby monetizing their flexibility.
The MoU with Powerledger is intended as a new step in realizing this goal.
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David Zenner, Head of Consumer Centricity at Elia Group, describes it as “an exciting collaboration” that will help demonstrate how network operators can enable energy transactions between prosumers and consumers.
“It will validate new functions in the traXes platform and will bring us closer to the realization of the consumer-centric energy system of the future. Moreover, it will enable us to utilize renewable energy more and better in the future.”
Elia Group’s traXes platform is designed to enable the efficient and secure sharing of consumer data between market parties and is complementary to Powerledger’s xGrid blockchain-enabled platform, which gives users the choice of which renewable energy to use and trade renewable energy peer-to-peer.
The venture is seen as combining the strengths of the two platforms.
Dr Jemma Green, co-founder and chair of Powerledger, comments that it contributes to a more efficient distributed network.
“This project shows how different parties can join forces in the new design of the electricity market, to transform the energy system towards more flexibility.”
The initiative with Elia is the latest in a series of initiatives that the Elia group has taken with blockchain in its business with others, including e-mobility and market integration of electric vehicles e-mobility and renewable energy certificate trading.
