Programmable Energy 6, Token Use Cases 1
Jos R?ling
Principle IT Architect, Global Center of Excellence Environment, Energy&Utilities, IBM Consulting. Helping clients accelerate the energy transition by applying exponential technologies like blockchain and tokenisation.
In the fourth post we discussed the token taxonomy in the fifth post we finished to the conceptual phase by adding wallets and energy accounts.
?Now it time to look at where the rubber meets the road.
If we model the tokens and wallets that will hold these tokens for the typical actors in the energy system, we see that generators will only have supply tokens and consumers have only demand tokens. Using colours, we can easily identify the type of generation. For consumers we can have an explicit preference for the mode of generation or as indicated by orange a ‘don’t care’ for consumers going for the lowest price. Prosumers are actor that will have both demand and supply, representing their consumption as well as their excess solar generation.
This base position is depicted in the diagram below.
Now we can visualise the scenario of a prosumer and its retailer and model their interactions based on tokens. I have sneaked in the time granular concept, to represent the daily fluctuation of solar generation and the energy consumption of a household.
The retailer is selling energy to the consumer, and when the solar PV is generating more that self consumption resulting in the infeed of the energy is a buy back by the retailer.
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This energy granular understanding represented by tokens enables different valuation of the energy.
When we mint a token based on a measurement value, eg by a smart meter or IoT sensor, we can time stamp the token. With the added time information, we could have different $ values based on time of day, linking it with the wholesale (intraday) market.
For me this opens up a whole new series of business models.
E.g. With an IoT enabled (close-in) boiler appliance the “Boiler OEM” is going to deliver hot water as a service and bundles the energy required to heat up the water with the boiler. Heating based on day ahead or intraday prices will lower the bill for the consumer and enables the OEM to tap into other markets, like balancing, as well with its aggregated portfolio of boiler.
I have create a series of short videos explaining the energy tokens as a module in the business innovation section of a MOOC from Tech University TU-Delft:
In the next post we will look at a more complex use case.