Dear Reader, welcome to my blog!
I have been involved in solar energy internships and studies, so I am pretty interested in how renewable energy is transforming the energy sector. I will briefly talk about how the conventional centralized energy systems are changing into decentralized systems with creative technologies such block chain energy applications.
Conventional power stations such as coal-fired, nuclear powered plants or hydroelectric stations and large solar power plants are centralized. They generate huge amounts of energy and this energy is transmitted to the end consumer over long transmission lines. However, this system is not very efficient, primarily due to the big losses over the long distance (and multiple port) transmission lines and the difficulty of providing electricity to distant small communities.
The introduction of distributed energy resources (DER) also known as decentralized energy, can alleviate these problems. DER represent relatively small grid-connected systems to generate energy on site (they are close to the delivery locations). Furthermore, these systems are usually modular and hybrid: incorporating different types of generated energy usually being renewable energy. Smart grids, which have become hot topic research areas, are used to control and coordinate DER systems.
The innovations and improvements in the renewable energy technologies, especially Photo Voltaic (PV) systems; bolstered the growth of DER. Consequently, the energy sector is transforming into a more resilient, less emission causing decentralized system owned by the people of the world. The unidirectional energy flow of centralized is now transforming into bi-directional energy flow with DER. So, consumers/homes can produce their energy and sell it through the grid. Consumers who produce and/or store their own energy are called prosumers. So, if we can produce our own energy and transmit it to a grid, why not sell it to other homes/peers?
In fact, entrepreneurs recently came up with block chain platforms that allow peer to peer energy sharing (P2P) that are currently operating in certain regions around the Energy trading applications were proven around world including Australia, Europe and Asia.
A good example is Power Ledger, a promising start up in P2P energy sharing based in Australia. The company defines their platform as “The Power Ledger Platform (Platform) is a trust-less, transparent and inter-operable energy trading platform that supports an ever-expanding suite of energy applications, with an exchangeable friction-less energy trading token, Sparkz.”.
Power Ledger achieved its first pilot application in Australia within a community in 2016 and has grown into international markets and various partnerships in 2017. They offer a creative portfolio of platform applications that I will talk about in a future post along with the other applications in the energy trading market.
The population growth, stressed resources and the global ecosystem responses that we have experienced over the last decades call for a new understanding to reshape the way we design and implement our new technologies. We only have one planet with finite resources to experiment with. I believe, designing technologies that utilize renewable sources and increase efficiency is a key factor to sustain the world habitable for our future generations.
I am very excited to follow the p2p energy companies’ journey and the transformation of the energy market. Although it will not happen so quickly, I think it will be a very interesting transformation.
Thanks for reading my post, I hope you liked it. See you in the next post!
References:
Power Ledger White Paper (v3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation
Published on March 23rd, 2018
Last updated on April 1st, 2021