BlockCypher And U.S. Department Of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory To Provide Blockchain Agnostic Distributed Energy Solution
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (PRWEB) January 23, 2018 -- BlockCypher, leading provider of Blockchain Web Services and infrastructure, is partnering with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to demonstrate how energy transactions can be settled across multiple blockchains and integrated technologies. For the first time, energy transactions involving distributed energy resources (DER) can be settled across multiple blockchains, starting with the Dash blockchain.
“NREL has been working with utilities, regulators, and other government agencies to leverage DER to enable a more cost effective, environmentally friendly, and efficient electric grid. Blockchain technology presents a transformative and highly scalable platform for enabling distributed energy markets, which could enable DER to interact more effectively with the larger grid. These interactions include more efficient demand response, capacity reserves, power quality support,” said Dylan Cutler, Senior Engineer and Principal Investigator for the project at NREL. “NREL and BlockCypher will show how peer to peer payments can be facilitated and settled on the Dash network between two test homes in NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF). The project will ideally then be scaled to include utility interaction and multiple homes on a feeder.”
BlockCypher Head of Growth Karen Hsu said, “The technology developed in this project enables people to exchange renewable energy, peer to peer. This would be important in a natural disaster or when the grid goes down for extended periods, just like we’ve seen last year across the U.S. This technology is also important as energy consumption continues to grow with more people using electric vehicles and battery powered devices. Peer to peer energy exchange could improve the match of generation and demand, reducing under voltage or brownouts during peak energy usage.”
Not only will this help those in emergency situations, it has the potential to create significant economic, societal and environmental benefits.
CEO of Dash Core Ryan Taylor said, “By enabling smart meters with the ability to exchange digital currency for electricity, we can make the grid more efficient and stable by enabling the monetization of stored energy and energy production at the endpoints of the grid. It can also help avoid costly infrastructure upgrades if our grids can operate more efficiently. Dash is uniquely fit to facilitate these payments, because it is designed to scale to massively large transactions while maintaining very low transaction costs.”
While other blockchain-based energy, wind, and solar projects have been explored in Austria, Australia, Germany and England, this is the first time the U.S. Department of Energy is exploring such progressive technology to facilitate peer to peer energy transactions. The ability to test in NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) laboratory enables assessment of technical performance, such as hardware responses and transaction settlement speed, at the megawatt scale. While some of the blockchain based renewable energy projects have developed energy specific coins, this is the first blockchain and energy technology agnostic solution.
“NREL is the only federal laboratory dedicated to research, development, commercialization, and deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies,” Hsu said. “We are excited to be working with them on a blockchain agnostic, distributed energy system, where people can immediately share energy (solar, hydro, or wind), charge their hybrid motor vehicles at distributed power stations in homes and businesses, and pay for their energy usage at lower costs online.”
Karen Hsu, BlockCypher, http://www.blockcypher.com, +1 (415) 531-4589, [email protected]
Share this article