Australian company Power Ledger will start testing a blockchain system that will allow households to sell excess solar-generated electricity to each other without mediators.

An experiment involving 10 families will last 8 weeks. According to Power Ledger's co-founder Jemma Green, if successful, the project will increase the use of rooftop solar panels and allow customers to buy electricity with no extra charges. The blockchain transparency enables the seller and the buyer to track the movement of electricity as well as the movement of funds.

“Presently, if you’ve got surplus solar electricity you sell it back for a low feed-in tariff and buy it back (from the grid) for a high rate. Using (Power Ledger), you can sell it to your neighbour at somewhere between the two.” 

The seller's revenue will be less than the uniform tariff but more than one would get from selling it to their retailer, Green said. According to her,

“It’s a win for the people who have been able to afford to invest in roof-top solar, but also a win for customers who haven’t: they will be able to access clean, renewable energy at effectively a ‘wholesale’ rate. Everyone wins.”

Though this technology seems to strip retailers from their profit, some of them have expressed an interest in it, as it did Synergy that may try it in 2017 in Perth metro area.

“If you can enable people with solar to sell power to each other, they’ll be sending it across the grid (rather than storing it in batteries) which will maintain the use of the grid – and therefore the value of it,” commented the Power Ledger's co-founder.

Blockchain implementation to simplify the interaction between buyer and seller is increasing in other sectors of the Australian economy. As CoinFox previously wrote, the Sydney-based software company Full Profile offers the distributed ledger technology to grain producers to ensure timely payment for the delivery. 

The pioneer in the P2P energy trade was the Park Slope social justice activist Eric Frumin who sold excess renewable energy to ex ENERGY STAR National Director Bob Sauchelli on 11 April 2016. The transaction was inaugural for The TransActive Grid, a New York-based peer-to-peer energy transaction platform powered by Ethereum.

Lyudmila Brus