Four Questions with Arno Laeven
Get to know the people of the Energy Web community! In this recurring series, we pose four questions to a member of the team. These are their perspectives and insights. In this edition, we talk to Arno Laeven. He currently heads strategy and market development at EWF. He was the founder and lead of Shell’s Global Blockchain Center of Excellence, and in prior roles, he led blockchain initiatives for major corporations such as Bosch, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, and Philips.
WHY ARE YOU SO PASSIONATE ABOUT WORKING ON DIGITAL AND DECENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGIES IN THE ENERGY SECTOR?
The energy sector itself is one of the big drivers for the energy transition that needs to happen. Using decentralized technologies like blockchains will create an opportunity to accelerate the transition, or maybe even make it possible at all. And yet the transition is extremely challenging: we’re talking about a very complex system—energy—combined with a technology that can be hard to grasp—blockchain—and a paradigm change in how that system is setup—from top-down to bottom-up. That makes it very exciting to work in this space.
ONE YEAR FROM NOW, WHAT IS THE BIGGEST ADVANCEMENT OR MILESTONE WE’LL SEE IN ENERGY BLOCKCHAIN AND OTHER DECENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGIES?
We will have proven that it is possible to get distributed energy resources (DERs) like batteries to trade on a market directly in a resilient, secure, and verifiable way. That will be a huge leap for blockchain in energy. [NOTE: EWF’s project in collaboration with Austrian Power Grid announced earlier this year is doing just that.]
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION OR MYTH THAT YOU CONTINUE TO FACE REGARDING BLOCKCHAIN AND DECENTRALIZED TECHNOLOGIES?
Oh, where should I start? There are so many! Maybe the biggest one is that blockchain is a truth machine. It is not. It is a ‘commitment machine’ as Chris Dixon of Andreesen Horowitz explained in his post. You can be certain that a machine has done or will do something in the way that you upfront have defined that it should do. That seems quite mundane, but it is an amazing feat.
HOW SHOULD UTILITIES AND OTHER GRID OPERATORS BE THINKING ABOUT DECENTRALIZED DIGITAL SOLUTIONS?
They should see it as the technology that will help them accelerate the energy transition in a cost-efficient way. What more would you want as a grid operator?
