Joanna Hubbard’s enthusiasm for the blockchain platform she is helping to pioneer is evident within minutes of meeting her.
Instead of delivering a thinly disguised sales pitch for a bit of technology, she makes a lucid and engaging argument for a solution that she passionately believes is the key to helping deliver a successful decentralized energy market.
As the co-founder and chief operating officer of UK company Electron, Joanna – or Jo-Jo as she likes to be known – has for two and a half years been delivering the message that blockchain is the missing piece in the 21st century decentralized energy jigsaw.
And it’s a message that has gained considerable traction: since its early days Electron has had the backing of the UK government, Siemens and Japanese energy giant TEPCO, and this year it formed a blockchain consortium comprising Baringa, EDF Energy, Flexitricity, Kiwi Power, Northern Powergrid, Open Energi, Shell, Statkraft and UK Power Networks. Last year Electron was named by the World Economic Forum as one of the top 30 most promising technology pioneers.
Hubbard’s journey into blockchain started when she was working for consulting firm McKinsey in its Digital Strategy Transformation team. She read that ‘blockchain 1.0’ is the transfer of payments with bitcoin, cryptocurrency etc, and ‘blockchain 2.0’ would be the settlement of contractual relationships.
“And I had this moment of ‘Wow, that’s what you need for a decentralizing energy industry’,” she says.
She and her co-founder Paul Ellis worked on the concept, with the help of ex-npower chief Paul Massara as a “mentor and sounding board”, and Electron was born. Massara has since become the company’s chief executive.
Before we get into what blockchain is and does in the digital energy landscape, I ask Hubbard for her definition of what exactly ‘digitalization’ means in an energy sector context.
“Digitalization means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” she says. “In the 4D energy sector [digitalization, decarbonization, decentralization and democratization], the digitalization of energy refers to the collection of data.
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