Last week, the Energy Web Foundation (EWF) and Japanese utility Minna Denryoku (Minden) announced they completed a joint test of blockchain for renewables markets.
Founded in 2011, just two months after the Fukushima disaster, Minden aims to decentralize energy distribution centered around renewables such as solar and wind power. In late 2018, the firm launched its Enection 2.0 platform powered by NEM Blockchain, to connect buyers and sellers and pair electricity sales with energy attribute certificates (EACs) for green energy. The goal is to make electricity available from alternative sources.
After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami radically reduced Japan’s internal sources of electricity, the appetite for distributed energy sources increased. In 2016, the country deregulated its energy market — both generation and retail — to bolster alternate sources of power.
EWF and Minden combined resources for the trial, with the latter using Energy Web Chain and EW Origin with its Enection platform. The aim was to benchmark and evaluate its own platform. The project used actual data from 16 renewable assets throughout Japan (including solar PV, wind, hydro, and biomass) and one month of 30-minute demand data from 13 real energy customers.
“Japan is now one of the world’s largest deregulated electricity markets, and our collaboration with Minden has been a valuable opportunity to share mutual insights as the market continues to evolve,” said Micha Roon, chief technology officer for EWF.
The non-profit EWF is piloting use cases for blockchain in the energy sector, and last year launched the Energy Web Chain to help companies build decentralized applications (dApp). It has a 100-member strong affiliate network with big names such as German utility EnBW, Total, GE, PG&E, Shell and Siemens, among many others.
EWF’s blockchain platform has been used by Thailand’s PTT Group and Singapore’s SP Group for renewable energy marketplaces.
Meanwhile, French utility company ENGIE was one of the first to migrate a dApp onto Energy Web Chain.
In Spain, energy companies Iberdrola and Acciona are using EWF blockchain technology for traceability of renewables.
