Using Blockchain to Incentivise User to Generate Renewable Energy
With all the buzz and noise at the moment with the huge amount of initial coin offerings, (ICOs) that are happening, its hard to know what is good, what is not and what are the scams where users are launching an ICO for a quick money grab.
Everyday we've been analysing and breaking down all the ICOs that we can find and working out what the best ones are. We're looking for real work applications that solve business problems. We're making sure that the company behind the ICO have a good team, established business, have good contacts and partnerships and so on to ensure that our money is going to a company that will actually grow and be around for longer than a few years.
Take a look at Kickstarter and all the failed campaigns, or even Silicon Valley and all the failed startups.
It's very hard to know what will work and what will be around for the long terms.
In comes, PowerLedger.io. This company has a promising future with a well established business with experts in the power and energy industry solving the energy issues in Australia and around the world.
They're taking the concept of decentralisation and making the power network decentralised. Moving away from the monolithic power stations of the old and helping encourage renewable power contributors to stay connected and generate power for the entire energy grid.
In Australia, we've been having various issues with 'energy security'. I say that in inverted commas as its a term our politicians have coined up. But there have been many times when the power to the grid has been compromised with single points of failure resulting in large scale blackouts. With the introduction of large power storage banks, thanks to Elon Musk, we'll see some stability in that but more and more users will start to disconnect themselves from the expensive grid network and become completely power independent. This is a good thing but it leaves high density home owners and businesses paying for the entire network and infrastructure. People living in apartments and areas where solar panels or wind generation isn't possible will be missing out since they can not disconnect themselves from the grid.
This is where PowerLedger can help.
PowerLedger is using the blockchain to incentivise users to stay on the grid by generating tokens to sell to other users. As their solar panels generate power and feed it back to the network, this will generate 'spark' tokens, that can be sold to other users at a rate much cheaper than what majority of the energy providers and offer. This then allows users that live in apartments or highrises to purchase these 'sparks' to pay for the electricity usage in their homes.
The idea and program has been trials in various places around Australia and New Zealand and is rapidly gaining more and more traction.
As of the time this article is published, PowerLedger is in its second week of ICO so far raising 17 million in its pre-sale period.
PowerLedger looks promising, it looks like it will solve the solution to solar panel owners and the energy grid and will help decentralise energy across the world. Best part of it all, its Australia's first company to do an ICO.
Watch this video interview with one of the co-founders which explains the ideas and concepts be PowerLedger. I hope to see it change the world.