European Energy Giants Successfully Pilot Blockchain Energy Trading
A trio of major energy firms – oil giants BP and Eni along & Wien Energie, Austria’s largest energy company, have completed an energy trading pilot over a blockchain developed by Canadian firm BTL.
The ‘intense 12-week pilot, as described by BTL, involved testing an energy trading confirmation solution over BTL’s Interbit blockchain platform. As CCN.com reported during its launch in January 2016, the Interbit platform is a multi-chain ledger that facilitates transfers of funds and assets for remittance and data sharing.
The Interbit platform also claims to automate a number of enterprise back-office processes, including confirmations, invoice generations, settlement, audit, reporting, actualizations and regulatory compliance. Benefits include lowered costs, increased efficiency, and reduced risks.”
The pilot proved successful in all test scenarios in processes involved in an energy trade lifecycle. The next step, BTL reveals, is to bring in additional energy companies as participants for energy trading over the blockchain. The pre-production phase is to last 6 months, where the solution will run alongside energy companies’ existing trade systems. A commercial live blockchain-based energy trading solution in real-world environments is next.
Guy Halford-Thompson, BTL’s Co-Founder and CEO stated:
Having demonstrated the reductions in risk and cost savings that are achievable we now have an opportunity to deliver the first successful blockchain based application to the energy market.
Wein Energie, which services nearly 2 million people in Austria with electricity, natural gas and heating, joined the trial in February this year with its chairman pointing to blockchain technology as a step toward the digitization of the energy industry. The energy provider is notably already dependent of decentralized energy generation and services, producing electricity and heat from renewable resources as well as cogeneration and waste recycling plants.
“Use of such technology can help by streamlining back office processes, leading to reduced risk, better protection against cyber threats and ultimately significant cost savings,’ stated Andrew Woosey, a partner at consulting firm EY which participated in the pilot.
The energy sector, particularly in Europe, is seeing a number of blockchain-based developments taking shape in recent times. Endesa, Spain’s largest energy provider, lauded the innovative decentralized technology as the “ancillary technology that enabled the development of bitcoin”. Underlining it as “an almost incorruptible digital ledger”, Endesa revealed plans to open a blockchain development lab.
A 2016 survey of German energy companies revealed that a majority of the industry is interested in harnessing blockchain technology toward future implementation.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
