U.K. software company Power Transition has claimed the technology used in its ‘intelligent energy software platform’ is fast and energy efficient enough to unlock an energy system which will see actors from electric vehicle drivers to national grid networks trading power in a fully connected system.
Power Transition, which today launched a £300,000 (€336,000) crowdfunding investment round to scale up its technology, said its platform can accurately tag every kilowatt-hour of energy circulating in a system, from generation to consumption, for the first time. The Dover-based start-up, founded in 2018, claims its technology can function at any scale, from local networks up to national grids, and offers small scale renewables generators the chance to secure revenue from real-time peer-to-peer energy trading whilst enabling grid networks to balance capacity.
A press release issued on behalf of Power Transition today stated the distributed ledger technology (DLT), or blockchain, used for its software platform uses the Hedera Hashgraph system which is able to process individual transactions far faster than rival systems and at lower energy consumption.
Faster
The company, based on the English south coast, said Hedera Hashgraph can process 10,000 transactions per second, compared to three-per-second for the more famous Bitcoin blockchain system and the industry-standard 1,700-per-second offered by the Visa card payments service. With Visa transactions requiring 3 Wh of energy each – and Bitcoin a huge 250 kWh – Power Transition said its DLT required just 1 Wh per transaction.
Power Transition said its software platform has already been deployed as part of a demonstration project in Corby, in the English East Midlands, to enable peer-to-peer energy trading between 47 zero-carbon homes. That project was match-funded by government agency Innovate UK.
The start-up aims to raise £300,000 to scale up its technology with the help of partner organizations and has also announced an agreement with London-based local energy market Bank Energi to establish a central London marketplace between commercial energy users and public sector organizations including the National Health Service.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
Parity in energy use with credit-card transactions is not enough. Kilowatt-hours of electricity cost very little indeed: about 10 cents or pennies each. Transactions costs have to be well under one cent/penny.
At least this company is starting to ask the right questions. Trust is not the issue:. nobody suspects their electric uilit of rigging the meter. It’s all about transactions costs and low cognitive burden. Ten minutes attention a year is already too much.
I’ll start taking blockchain startups seriously when they show they can compete on these metrics with well-designed central counterparty systems, like the one that handles trillions of dollars a day in the interbank foreign currency market. Never been hacked. Of course, for that sort of money they can hire defensive hackers from the Pentagon computer security Red Team, not Izzy from technical support.
Hi James, I totally agree with the comments you make. We are joined at the hip with Hedera Hashgraph which is unlike other blockchain in that it is very fast, over 10,000 transactions per second and the settlement period is less than 2.6 seconds and use less than 1 watt per transaction, meaning that our transaction costs can be very low, certainly less than 1 cent, or penny/watt. The trust issue is an inherent part of the design of the DLT right out of the box, it has shown to be Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant making it completely cyber secure without the need for defensive hackers from the Pentagon computer security Red Team!
Unlike central counterpart systems, we are able to develop specific use case applications very rapidly at very low cost. If you were to use a purpose built software solution to try and achieve the same levels of trust and functionality, would cost significantly more and take much, much longer to develop.
Anthony Morgan – CEO Power Transition