[Music playing]
>>Narrator: Lower costs and better technologies for distributed energy resources are
providing a whole new suite of control capabilities and generation resources for the
electric grid.
Among other benefits, distributed energy resources relieve pressure on
centralized grids and can boost resiliency during outages.
To take full advantage of these advanced technologies, BlockCypher and NREL
are collaborating to develop a new application to prove the concept of an open
market for peer-to-peer energy transactions.
This kind of market would give consumers more choices and lower energy costs.
It could also reduce infrastructure needs for utilities,
and give them a closer look at energy usage at the grid edge.
>>Karen Hsu: The purpose of this project is to really figure out a way to incentivize
people.
And the best way to incentivize people is to pay them.
And it's just that simple.
So using the blockchain, we were able to show not only how you could pay people, but
you could also show how you can send the energy receipt to that person.
So it's not only paying, but it's sending data over the blockchain.
>>Narrator: The application connects the home to blockchain infrastructure to settle
energy contracts and associated transactions.
Rapid transactions and next-to-nothing overhead costs make it possible.
>>Karen Hsu: So it's kind of like you and I are neighbors; you have energy to sell,
and I have energy to buy, usually at peak hours,
because it's too expensive for me to buy it from the utilities.
And so I'd love to buy it from you at a lower rate.
And of course, you'd like to sell it to me for some kind of profit.
Now, in this demonstration we're gonna show is really just that happening, right?
So how would we set up an agreement for the price at
which you are gonna sell energy to me?
>>Narrator: This application cryptographically signs meter readings to prove energy was
generated, then embeds them into the blockchain.
This enables secure commodity tracking, with the smart meter providing the
root of trust.
For this demo, the application is integrated with an NREL-developed home energy
management system called foresee.
foresee controls the hardware and the laboratory as the system finds the reduced pricing
available through the peer-to-peer contract.
It schedules appliance operation for that window, reshaping the electrical load of the
home and saving money for the homeowner.
When the exchange has completed, payment confirmation and the receipt are sent, and
the home returns to standard operations.
>>Dylan Cutler: Essentially what makes this lab unique for this project is the amount
of hardware connected to actual electrical distribution
inside the lab that allows us to test basically real-world home operations, all
the appliances and devices in your house, but
off the utility grid.
And so we're dealing with the technical issues without having to
resolve kind of all the policy and regulatory aspects.
We can just test performance of this system in a lab environment.
There's a lot of kind of talk around what blockchain could do for the energy sector,
and so we wanted to bring this into the lab to
do kind of controlled testing, and demonstrate some of the capabilities, and start to understand
what peer-to-peer transactions really look like.
And so that's almost like a building block of what a larger distributed energy market
could look like.
I think where we would like to take this from here is to replicate what
we're doing here, have hundreds of these homes being able to interact –
in the exact same peer-to-peer mechanism, and integrate those to a distribution feeder
model that we have here at the lab, and test out kind of impacts on larger utility grid
systems, and how that impacts the utilities.
Look at kind of the whole value proposition of this system.
>>Karen Hsu: This team clearly knows what they're doing.
They've been in this space for a long time, and they have the knowledge about
the industry and the technology.