Published August 27, 2018, 10:00 PM By Myrna M.
Velasco
Post its transition into having an
independent market operator (IMO), the country’s Wholesale Electricity Spot
Market (WESM) indicated openness to exploring ‘digital currency for
electricity’ as added layer on its future market trading portfolio.
According to Independent Electricity
Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) President Saturnino C. Juan, power
tokens are among the options they could foresee happening in the future,
although he qualified that the WESM has yet to undertake formal studies on
such.
“All these things can happen in the
future. We are seeing a lot of promise with that transition into an independent
market operator and with an entity now fully private, we can leverage on the
experience of our personnel and also the information that we gather as market
operator and explore these other markets, including the derivatives market,” he
said.
Blockchain applications, which could
include digital ‘energy tokens’, have been emerging as part of viable trading alternatives
in electricity markets.
This digital currency trading for
electricity could come in the form of cryptocurrency or any other digital
application of tokenizing the buying and selling of a kilowatt-hour of power
commodity.
Global experts have been noting that
after the ‘oilcoin’ of the petroleum sector, a ‘power-based token’ or digital
currency; as well as other methods of electricity commodity trading will
definitely come as the next big wave of innovation in the energy sector.
While bitcoin is currently the most
well known blockchain trading system, energy companies are devising other ways
on how to “tokenize and hedge” on electricity selling and purchasing with the
deployment of other digital applications.
German conglomerate Siemens, which
is also the technology supplier of the new market trading platform for WESM,
has been advancing into this sphere – initially with Lo3 Energy in the United
States, a trailblazing blockchain-enabled microgrid system in Brooklyn, in
which transactions are done with what they term as “exergy,” or energy token
which takes the form of distributed ledgers with cryptographic security.
This enabled the connection of 60
solar sites and has been empowering facility owners, not just to exercise
hedging but also for them to sell and buy electricity to and from the system at
any time they want.
Going forward into the future,
blockchain technologies are being pushed into market core to become part of
energy’s digital future. It is reckoned that pioneers and early adopters will
eventually emerge as the winners in the marketplace.
The decentralized systems, like
micro-grids, are considered perfect candidates for blockchain application. And
on the whole, this could democratize and revolutionize how energy is traded
across the market chain.
It is also seen that these digital
tools would be able to create new business models from energy suppliers to the
consumers, hence, it will be expanding the choice for electricity end-users.
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