What if blockchain were an essential tool for making the most of the potential of the cloud and energy consumption data in complete security?
Electricity was first imagined as a local source of energy close to where it was consumed, before the first alternating current power plant and Nikola Tesla's long-distance grid. Today, thanks to the development of NICTs, the trend is reversed, with players who are both consumers and suppliers of energy within an intelligent network that is now bidirectional. The electricity meter is the keystone between smart grid suppliers and customers, and concentrates all the transaction, trust and security issues associated with increasingly intelligent and flexible energy. Data is following the same trend as electricity, with an organization that has historically been local (on premises), then global (cloud), and increasingly decentralized (private cloud, peer 2 peer), with high value potential to make the smart factory a reality (among other things), but also with fears about cybersecurity. And it's precisely on this latter issue that blockchain makes sense.
The blockchain was first designed for the Bitcoin to guarantee the integrity and veracity of the virtual currency's transactions, dispensing with the need for a central authority thanks to a distributed architecture. An anonymous, confidential and ubiquitous register structured by a network of peer computers (known as miners) which "notarize" data in a trusted protocol logic dispensing with the need for trusted third parties. Any attempt at falsification is too costly and discouraged by the infinite redundancy of information upstream and downstream of an operation. Although this technology is still in its early stages, it offers definite advantages for the secure management of data and its decentralized use: gigantic computing power (256 times that of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers, according to Forbes!), guaranteed accessibility, transparency, inviolability, traceability and irreversibility of operations, and so on.
Applied to energy and combined with IIoT (Internet of Industrial Things), cloud and data science, blockchains such as Ethereum or Scanergy are making several high value-added uses accessible that were historically too cumbersome or costly to manage alone: automatically auditing the CO2 emissions of a global fleet of factories or a solar power plant with several hundred communicating meters, guaranteeing the absence of error in energy billing and the correct calibration of the meter used to produce the bill, creating a renewable energy marketplace based on a microgrid between private individuals, etc. In the case of Bitcoin, mining (or adding blocks of contributions) on the blockchain has the same default time step of 10 minutes as the measurement time step of the most common electricity meters. The question remains, however, concerning the energy cost of blockchain-related calculations, which is currently staggering, to add to the already high cost of datacenters.
Of course, energy intelligence doesn't just involve meters or blockchain, but it could be one more tool to make this goal a reality.
