The rapid rise of local and community based renewable energy generation, combined with the rollout of smart meters, breakthroughs in IT, and electricity grid congestion is bringing about radically new collaborative economy business models in energy. In response, people are beginning to trade energy locally. Distributed ledger (blockchain) technologies are used to authenticate and track ownership of energy production, consumption, and demand-side response ensuring each unit of energy is securely and transparently accounted for. This project will help lay the groundwork for such systems in the UK – analysing the regulatory, security, engineering and societal requirements for their acceptability.
Target Outcomes:
- A roadmap study of potential policy and regulatory pathways for the establishment of blockchain enabled peer-to-peer community energy trading in Great Britain. This will be the result of literature reviewing, holding deliberative workshops, and engaging with stakeholders in both government and industry.
- Conducting, and reporting on, a national scale survey experiment testing social acceptability under different designs of peer-to-peer, blockchain enabled electricity trading in communities.
- A Perspective style journal article on the scope for blockchain applications in energy.
- The construction and demonstration at engagement events of a physical model of a blockchain enabled peer-to-peer energy trading system.
- Reports, presentations and papers from an international academic symposium on blockchain applications in energy.
Public engagement and dissemination (to 26-02-2018):
- 26 February 2018: Invited to talk to Crown Commercial Service on peer-to-peer energy trading and how this might be used for the benefit of the public sector, to an audience of clients including the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Justice, Home Office and Department for Education (London).
- 23 February 2018: Opening lecture at the BEIS/HMT/Ofgem ‘Blockchain in the Energy System’ conference (London).
- 6 February 2018: Invited to present to the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group for Energy Studies on peer-to-peer community energy trading (London).
- 2 February 2018: Invited to lecture at the Fifth Seminar of the Construction Blockchain Consortium on ‘Peer-to-peer energy trading: why buildings and blockchains matter’ (London). <https://www.constructionblockchain.org/seminar5>
- 24 January 2018: Panel member at the UK Association of Energy Engineers event ‘Blockchain enabled energy trading in communities’ (London).
- 4 December 2017: Invited to present at the KAPSARC ‘Electricity Reform and Technological Disruption’ Workshop on the emergence of distributed energy resources and digitalisation, and how these can affect the fundamentals of the electricity sector worldwide (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia).
- 28 November 2017: Presented at the MarketForce Smart Metering Forum, the leading industry smart metering conference in the UK, on peer-to-peer energy trading applications (London).
- 7 November 2017: Keynote address at the 4th European Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring on ‘Disaggregation, Digitalisation and Distributed Ledgers in the Global Energy Transition’ (London).
- 3 November 2017: Presentation at CMS Lawyers ‘Blockchain in the Power Sector’ event on how blockchain can be applied across the sector as well as key legal and practical considerations (London).
- 23 October 2017: Presentation to the UK Committee on Climate Change on ‘Blockchains and Carbon Budgets’ (London).
- 13 September 2017: Led, organised and presented at a roundtable between Ofgem and industry on blockchain applications in energy, bringing together leading industry and academic representatives working on distributed ledger in energy use-cases, to help inform Ofgem about the range of impacts on their regulatory framework (London).
- 22 June 2017: Lecture at the International Energy Agency Demand Side Management University (DSMU) on ‘Peer-to-peer energy trading on blockchains: Assessing potential benefits and limitations for energy system stakeholders’ (London). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcufQeaOK1U>
- 20 June 2017: UCL public lecture on ‘Transactive Energy: Turning the energy system outside-in’ (London). <https://youtu.be/dhMBHLfvrC8>