Energy Business and Blockchain #5 (final) – Notable areas in the future based on analysis of areas of applicaiton
The previous article focused on ICO in the energy sector. The conclusion was that strengthening financial regulation is an irreversible global trend and that regulation-compliant security tokens and utility tokens for decentralized protocols are future possibilities. This article, the final article of the series, wraps up blockchain application in the energy sector as of June 2019. What business can take advantage of blockchain technology? I will try to analyze the area of application of blockchain technology in the energy sector. Setting aside whether it is good or not, many applications are seed oriented. In other words, it is not that solutions are developed out of social issues to solve, but that applications developed out of functionalities and characteristics of blockchain technology are proposed. A short description of characteristics of blockchain technology, or distributed ledger technology to be exact, is that multiple participants that are connected in a peer-to-peer fashion in computer network approve transactions by following defined protocol and maintain record of transaction records. Cases of applications that take advantage of the characteristics of the technology can be organized as follows: Many existing cases use the characteristic of “decentralized transactions” that trade energy (or ancillary objects to electricity such as attribute values associated with electricity and flexibility [1]). Those include cases that makes measured electricity digital assets, ones that performs settlements (financial transactions), and ones that combine the both. [1] Ability to respond to variations of demand and supply, not the value of electricity per-se Energy transaction applications include peer-to-peer energy trading that is the most popular application in the energy sector, trading in wholesale market, grid management applications such as flexibility trading and virtual power plant (VPP), and disintermediation model that proposes means for consumers to access directly to wholesale market. Financial transaction applications include fundraising…