This brief is part of the IRENA project “Innovation landscape for a renewable-powered future”, which maps the relevant innovations, identifies the synergies and formulates solutions for integrating high shares of variable renewable energy (VRE) into power systems. The synthesis report, Innovation landscape for a renewable-powered future: Solutions to integrate variable renewables, illustrates the need for synergies among different innovations to create actual solutions. Solutions to drive the uptake of solar and wind power span four broad dimensions of innovation: enabling technologies, business models, market design and system operation. Along with the synthesis report, the project includes a series of briefs, each covering one of 30 key innovations identifi ed across those four dimensions. The 30 innovations are listed in the figure below.
This brief provides an overview of blockchain1 technology and its applicability in the power sector, with a focus on the means by which it can enable the integration of more renewable energy. With “smart contracts”, blockchain has the potential to play a major role in helping to integrate renewables by automating processes, increasing power system flexibility and reducing transaction costs. It can simultaneously accelerate the adoption of other technologies, such as storage and electric vehicles (EVs), leading to improved grid management and system operation. With the relatively recent increase in power sector complexity comes a need for greater intelligence and transparency. Surging numbers of smart devices coming online are generating vast amounts of granular data – important fuel for burgeoning technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to increase the efficiency of power systems and reduce energy usage. New tools to manage all this data in a secure, efficient and transparent manner are being sought, and blockchain technology is already proving useful. New business models in the energy sector enabled by blockchain technology continue to emerge and evolve, with the spotlight currently on local peer-to-peer (P2P) and wholesale power trading as well as innovative means of project financing in developing countries, among others.
