Daily Bit #178: Electricity in the Paper
Industry Updates
- And here… we… go. Morgan Stanley is looking into bitcoin swap trading for clients.
- Frankie Scoops, aka @fintechfrank, joined The Block as a crypto correspondent — great stuff Frank and well deserved. *applause*
- Blockchain security company BitGo was approved to provide crypto custodial services in the United States.
- Ethereum’s next update, Constantinople, is just around the bend — here’s what you need to know.
Top Story
Electricity in the Paper
To close out this week, we’re bringing you an excerpt from our interview with Power Ledger co-founder and chairman Dr. Jemma Green. Power Ledger is exploring applications for blockchain in the energy markets by developing ways to trade renewable energy resources in a peer-to-peer fashion.
I hold the opinion that most ICOs / altcoin projects are either money grabs containing half-baked ideas. Roadmaps are hazy and actual use cases for the company’s product are TBD.
I don’t think that’s the case with Power Ledger, and no I don’t own any $POWR (this is not a shill). Energy consumption and the distribution of alternatives is a legitimate problem being tackled in today’s society. If you’re interested in or work in the energy sector, I’d consider carving out time to look into the project. Might be worth your while in gauging what direction the market could be headed in.
Cheers — Kevin
P.S. — If you can spare a couple minutes to give some feedback (i.e. “How’s My Driving?”), I’d love to hear from you. Please shoot me an email at hello@thedailybit.news.
You’re based in Perth Australia and have been with Power Ledger for a little over 2 years now. Can you break down what Power Ledger is and your involvement with the project?
Sure, I’m one of the co-founders and chairman of the company. Power Ledger is a technology company that enables distributed electricity markets using the blockchain. Our platform can be used to enable the trading of electricity as well as the settlement and payment between buyers and sellers. It’s also used as a way to fund energy assets — how the assets are funded and how they are operated.
As for “energy assets” and P2P energy trading, does that essentially mean you wouldn’t have to rely upon a central party to control your energy supply and you’d have less dependency on them?
You might have a household with solar panels or a battery that can sell its surplus to their neighbors, or there could be large solar farms that want to sell to many smaller customers instead of presently selling to one larger wholesale market participant. The platform can also be for carbon credits and certificates.
For example, we’re doing a project in California using electric vehicles to encourage them to charge during the day from solar-based electricity and they’d receive a carbon credit for doing that as opposed to charging at night, which may well be from fossil fuel-based electricity.
Electricity or energy can come from many different sources. Our technology works particularly well with renewables, but it can also be used for more traditional energy assets too.
In terms of what else Power ledger is doing — it’s not just P2P energy trading — there are a couple other items on your roadmap, and there are a couple other ways that the platform is intended to be used when it is deployed at scale, correct?
Yes — electric vehicle charging, carbon credits associated with the generation of renewables or tracking carbon emissions from traditional energy assets, and looking at how to fund energy assets as well. There’s a lot of different components of the electricity market and we’ve developed products to respond to problems that we’ve noticed in the market or pain points for incumbent players.
As for competitors in P2P energy trading. For starters, if you have competitors then you probably know that you’re in a good market — you can look around and can say that ok, somebody else has the same idea — are other companies trying to do the same thing as Power Ledger or at least a similar aspect of electrical trading?
There’s quite a lot. I mean, it’s fair to say they’ve been popping up like mushrooms. I think there must be 10 or 15 other players out there, some of them are focused on one area like carbon, others are particularly focused on disrupting a particular strategy, such as disrupting retailers — we want to partner with retailers by contrast — and there are some that are focused on funding the energy assets as well.
There’s a very diverse landscape of different players out there, and we welcome them all to the extent that they’re good actors and they don’t spread misinformation. I think it’s helpful to have them out there because we are creating a new marketplace and it’s important that their efforts are expedited to ensure that we are able to transition to a low cost and low carbon resilient energy future.
In terms of what you’ve been looking at in the space in general, is there anything that’s catching your eye recently in the news or any interesting projects?
I think the carbon markets is an area that is quite interesting. In terms of blockchain companies, most of them are more early days and nascent than the electricity markets, and electricity is fairly developed, whereas carbon markets, you know there’s a lot of potential to look at how the tokens or crypto can be used to create market incentives to solve climate change and mitigate carbon emissions and help countries transition from high carbon companies. I’m writing a piece for Forbes right now that will come out in the next week or so that will profile what’s happening in that space and the potential for blockchain to help, so I think that’s quite exciting.
Governance is another issue that I think about quite a lot. You have smart contracts, but ultimately you’re going to have humans involved at a certain point. And you want less humans involved than the current manual system of governing organizations and countries for that matter, but you do need that human intervention. And I think that’s very interesting, looking at what role do humans play still in the smart contract world and how can you ensure the integrity of an organization or system and how smart contracts will be replicated with paper contracts as well so that courts can actually read and interpret them clearly too. So there’s quite a lot that’s yet to be worked out in these areas and I think that’s quite exciting.
Brain Fuel
- 11 min read: Crypto price observations (DK)
- 16 min read: Security Tokens and The Digital Wrapper (Derek Edward Schloss)
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