National Centre for Energy Systems Integration

Event Items

CESI Webinar - Blockchain technology in the energy sector: A review of challenges and opportunities

Blockchains or distributed ledgers are an emerging technology that have drawn enormous interest from incumbent firms, commercial startups, technology developers, financial institutions, national governments, energy utility companies and academia.

Date/Time: Tues 16 January 2018, 09:00-10:00

Blockchains promise transparent, tamper-proof and secure systems that can enable novel business solutions, bring significant gains and potentially disrupt well-established business models of energy system stakeholders. A central challenge in this early development stage of the technology lies in finding a way to identify opportunities, promising use cases, limitations and risks.

In this workshop, we will present an overview of fundamental principles that underpin blockchain technologies, varying system architectures and distributed consensus algorithms. Next, we focus on use cases and current business solutions for the energy industry by providing a systemic review of the state of the art. Opportunities and challenges for numerous use cases will be discussed, including emerging P2P energy trading, IoT applications and decentralised marketplaces.

Finally, we will discuss requirements for future development, challenges and market barriers the technology needs to overcome to get past the hype phase, prove its commercial viability and finally be adopted in the mainstream.

Registration for this event is by invitation only.