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Power Ledger Extend Solar Trading Trial

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Western Australian based tech company Power Ledger have extended their solar trading trial – let’s take a look at what stage 2 of the company’s p2p renewable trading scheme will encompass.

Solar Trading and Power Ledger

Power Ledger’s blockchain technology has been used since November 2018 to track the transactions of rooftop solar energy traded between 18 households in Fremantle, Western Australia.

The Fremantle Smart Cities project was titled RENeW Nexus and its goal was to demonstrate peer-to-peer energy trading between residential houses. 

Project partners included Curtin University, government-owned retailer Synergy, Western Power, the government-owned network operator, and the City of Fremantle itself.

The trial works by utilising Western Power’s existing network with Synergy’s customers. The Power Ledger platform allows households to buy and sell excess rooftop solar energy in real-time, with residents able to view electricity usage in 30-minute intervals, rather than waiting for their quarterly bill.

Since the trial started in November 2018, Power Ledger has processed almost 50,000 transactions on its platform per month and tracked over 4 megawatt hours of peer-to-peer renewable energy trades. Safe to say it’s been a roaring success, so they’re off to start the second phase of their trial. 

Power Ledger are also working outside of Australia in varied capacity:

  • Silicon Valley Power in the City of Santa Clara alongside Clean Energy Blockchain Network
  • BCPG T77 Thailand
  • Kansai Electric Power Co. (Phase 1)
  • Vicinity Castle Plaza

Saving With Solar Interview with Power Ledger

We had a chat to Power Ledger about the exciting second phase of their renewable energy trading scheme

With ~50k transactions per month currently, what’s the target for 2020?
Power Ledger intends to double the number of participants in the second phase of the trial.

How many trial partners will be involved in stage 2?
In the second phase of the trial we continued to partner with Synergy, Western Power, Curtin University and EnergyOS 
 
Any info on the ‘additional pricing models’ in stage 2? 
The pricing model for stage 2 is similar to stage 1, with some minor tweaks. The partners will be organising workshops and surveying participant to learn more about pricing models. 
 
How much of the trading is automated so the prosumers don’t have to do much?
All the trading is automated. in this deployment however, participants have the option to set their preferred buy and sell prices for peer to peer energy. They can be as active as optimising their prices and trading on a half hourly basis. Alternatively they could go in the platform and set and forget their prices they are happy with.

VPP 2.0 (Virtual Power Plants 2.0)

According to a roadmap for Power Ledger released on Medium last year, the goal is to enact VPP 2.00 – which will allow a lot of options for households who want to trade solar. It also factors in ideas for a two-way electricity grid and options for households to assist the grid – be that through capacity, frequency control, or voltage support.  

We see VPP 2.0, or Virtual Power Plants 2.0, as a natural extension of our peer-to-peer functionality, tying all our other products together. xGrid will evolve into an optimized model of a virtual power plant, to create a conduit for the transaction of value between the owners of distributed energy resources and multiple counterparties.

Self-executing smart contracts will integrate with physical switches in the network, creating an autonomous power market with secure value transfer between consumers, energy markets and networks. For example, a household with solar may normally be trading energy in a P2P market, until they are offered a higher rate by the network to provide capacity, frequency control, or voltage support.

Power Ledger extend Solar Trading Trial to Stage 2. (source: Power Ledger)
Power Ledger extend Solar Trading Trial to Stage 2. (source: Power Ledger)
 
 

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WA Electricity Grid Needs Upgrade For Solar

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A leading energy export from the Australian Energy Market Operator has warned that the WA Electricity Grid requires upgrades over the next couple of years or else it risks being completely overwhelmed by the influx of solar in the state. 

The WA Electricity Grid & Solar

According to TheWest’s website, solar energy now makes up the majority of the WA Electricity Grid’s energy collection – representing around 700MW of capacity. They interviewed Cameron Parrotte, the head of strategy and innovation at the Australian Energy Market Operator – who noted that measures need to be put into place to manage the influx of solar into the grid before it starts to overload.  Parrotte said the amount of additional solar capacity is currently growing at 35% per year. 

“When you talk about comparison to other States, percentage-wise we are flying,” he said.

“Some people then say ‘you’ll start running out of roof space’.

“What you are tending to find is that some people who were the early adopters, some of their PVs are starting to reach the end of their life.

“Instead of putting up another 1kW to replace the 1kW they had, they’re putting in 5kW.”

Parrotte / The West said they believe solar power could fully displace conventional methods of energy generation (coal/gas fired plants) for short intervals within as few as five years. Initially, these intervals would be restricted to times when electricity demand is low (e.g. mild, sunny days in the middle of the day) but surely sends another message to those trying to delay the death of traditional electricity methods. It’s now up to providers and authorities to upgrade the grid and make sure it’s able to take the excess power solar will provide. 

We’ve previously written about blockchain powered P2P energy trading fintech platforms such as Power Ledger or WePower along with less technologically intense solutions such as community solar – the writing is on the wall here and it’s only a matter of time before renewable energy completely overtakes coal and gas fired plants, so it’s important the government act now to ensure the grid is capable of withstanding the new era of energy generation!

WA Electricity Grid - Sunwise - Ludlow Solar Installation
WA Electricity Grid – Sunwise – Ludlow Solar Installation (source: sunwiseenergy.com.au)

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Power Ledger Renewable Energy Blockchain ICO

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Power Ledger is a leading peer-to-peer (p2p) marketplace for prosumers and consumers to buy and sell renewable energy. It’s powered by the blockchain and has a token generation event coming soon. We’re super excited about this ICO and think it’s going to be a massive step forward for Australia, the blockchain, renewable energy, and especially energy tech in countries with emerging markets which could benefit greatly from this technology. With electricity prices surging over the past few years the market is ripe for energy sector disruption.

About Power Ledger

The platform is developed and working successfully in commercial settings in the Australian market (supported by “leading energy providers” such as Vector NZ, Western Power WA and TAS Networks)- a significant amount of investment has been placed in building relationships with market leaders in the Australasian energy and property sectors. Money raised in this ICO will be used to further expansion in Australia and abroad in emerging markets such as India.

Individuals and institutions will be able to participate in Power Ledger’s blockchain energy ecosystem by investing in POWR tokens, which will be tradeable on Ethereum and can also be converted to SPARKZ – which are unique tokens you can trade for units of electricity on the private blockchain Power Ledger will run.

David Martin, the managing director, discussed their plans for the future on the PL website: “We have been and remain the global leader in this technology space, and our platform is already changing the face of renewable energy trading in a number of communities,” said Martin. “We see our Token Generation Event as an exciting opportunity to bring democratic, peer-to-peer renewable energy marketplaces to many more countries across the globe.”

Power Ledger Token Generation Event

On August 25 Power Ledger announced that a heavy interest in their token generation event means that the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) – Australia’s first on the blockchain – could raise a total valuation of around $100m. The POWR tokens were offered at a pre-sale on August 27 with the first 100M offered to the public at a set price and another 90 million at a private discounted pre sale. The pre-sale ended up raising $17 million and was sold out within 72 hours. with Martin advising SmartCompany that the next  round could bring the funds raised by their ICO to between $20 – $30m.

Up to 250m more POWR tokens will be released in September -this will be an uncapped event (i.e. the market will determine the sale end price). There’s also a bounty campaign if you’re interested in spreading the word about Power Ledger and gaining some POWR (ERC20) tokens for helping.

Power Ledger Renewable Energy Blockchain ICO
Power Ledger (source: tge.powerledger.io)

For further information on the planned Token Generation Event, visit https://powerledger.io/ or join the Telegram group here. We’ll be posting an update as soon as the next POWR token sale date is announced!

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