Climate Impact And How Blockchain Technology Will Help
Go into any major industry event, from finance and banking to healthcare, cyber security or renewable energy and the topic of Blockchain technology will come up. Most of us know about Blockchain through the cryptocurrency called Bitcoin but the applications of this technology are vast.
The reason for this is Blockchain acts as a ledger, it removes the middleman and allows providers and consumers to have transparency and interact directly. Every transaction is built on a stackable ledger that cannot be modified by anyone without breaking the chain. This is its true essence of what a fair market of supply and demand should function as. In doing so, it also removes speculation and creates a peer-to-peer market that places the influence away from central authority and onto more distributed peer-to-peer platforms.
When it comes to renewable energy, Blockchain technology has the power (pun intended) to create an effective peer-to-peer market that incentivizes individuals and companies to further adopt distributed renewable energy. It promotes capital markets to function in real-time supply and demand and enables the life cycle of electrons to be tracked from creation to consumption within the microgrid.
The addition of Blockchain technology adds a level of redundancy in a world where climate change will disrupt the generation and transmission of energy from a centralized system, which is an inefficient way to distribute power as most electrons created from the generation degrade during transmission.
The opportunities and obstacles were highlighted in a report by PWC in 2016 on “an opportunity for energy producers and consumers” In it, the report discussed how all buildings would interconnect in a microgrid. It would reduce transaction costs across the system, increase the efficiency of processes, provide direct interactions, make markets more fluid, and eventually the interconnection would also bring communities closer.
Europe is currently leading the way in identifying how best to scale this technology. The technology behind energy-related microgrids is still in its infancy and there are many regulatory and policy hurdles to overcome.
Blockchain allows us to visualize communities to evolve that are the next leap from agrarian to industrial into self-sufficient autonomous communities. Where anything centralized will be inefficient. This future reminded me of the Venus Project, which is a blueprint based on Jacque’s Fresco’s vision of how the future could be created. The systems are inter-looped and resources are shared in a renewable system.
The disruption of Blockchain technology is a compelling case to tackle climate change and incentivize the adoption of renewable energy. Yet from a planning perspective, it is daunting given our entire infrastructure is built on a centralized system. But as case studies like the Brooklyn MicroGrid enable the technology to advance and reduce cost, the future will be distributed with Blockchain as the leading technology in the fight against climate change.
