Three major European grid operators are rolling out a new blockchain platform to tap the growing penetration of small-scale distributed energy resources for grid balancing. As behind-the-meter resources like batteries, heat pumps and electric cars proliferate, challenges remain in finding ways for them to benefit the wider grid. Aggregating such systems — and compensating their owners — requires large numbers of transactions to be balanced and validated constantly.

The payoff, however, is potentially huge: homes and businesses could make money by offering their flexible energy resources to grid operators. That would make it more valuable to own such systems and help to increase the overall penetration of renewables. The Equigy consortium, launched last month, believes blockchain is the key to unlocking such a system. The consortium includes three transmission system operators (TSOs): TenneT (with operations in Germany and the Netherlands), Swissgrid of Switzerland, and Terna of Italy. Denmark’s Energinet is in the process of joining, opening the way for initial deployment across five countries.

The Equigy consortium will run a free-to-use “crowd-balancing” platform to register and track transactions. “We see the project as one of market facilitation, which is a role of TSOs in the European context,” René Kerkmeester, digital transformation lead at TenneT and co-founder and program director of Equigy, told GTM. The consortium will build on pilots done by TenneT that have linked to home batteries from sonnen and electric cars from Tesla, validating the transactions using blockchain. After showing that the underlying technology works, TenneT approached other EV makers including […]