Using Blockchain, Brooklyn’s Latest Craze: Making Your Own Electric Grid

The politico recently reported on a news that combines two topics that are dear to me. Clean energy and cryptocurrency. So here is an excerpt of it and the link to the article is at the bottom end.

Brooklyn-based LO3 Energy is running a pilot program that would permit renewable energy users to sell power directly to their neighbors. In effect, the neighbors would become their own small power grid in their neighborhood.

The microgrid system that LO3 had devised would essentially cut out the middleman, using a phone app and smart meters to enable neighbors to strike deals for how much electricity they want to buy from one another and at what price. The technology that makes this possible, Santiago explained to Guerra, is blockchain, the same secure information exchange that makes bitcoin trading possible.

“The idea with blockchain is that everything is done peer to peer,” says Duke University economist Campbell R. Harvey. “With a microgrid, people that have solar panels can actually trade amongst themselves. They don’t have to have a centralized person in the middle that is taking a piece of the action.” In a time when the national electricity grid could be vulnerable to terrorism and climatic events, a new technology “could potentially resolve some of these problems,” he says.