The energy landscape is changing dramatically and so are people’s understanding of the nuances and opportunities that come with energy savings. For many businesses energy savings used to be about the cost of their supply. But today energy impacts so much more than the bottom-line. Getting your energy strategy right opens broad business benefits which go beyond cost savings.

 

An energy savings review or audit allows business to truly understand their energy use and make changes to their operations accordingly. However, the current process of obtaining an energy performance contract can be time consuming, involving an intensive calculation approach using audits, baseline measurements and meter readings. This approach can also cause disagreements on the extent of the energy savings as a several factors within a building, facility or site are subject to constant change.

 

At DNV, we believe blockchain technology has the potential to simplify the process and reduce the cost of verification significantly. By installing sensors in the facilities with sub metering devices, it would be possible to measure the energy savings resulting from various retrofit initiatives.

Based on pre-set rules and measurements the blockchain ledger would record energy consumption from devices, include sensor information and calculate the amount of savings. These would be converted automatically to energy savings coins and distributed according to the contractual split. This would remove the detailed verification required, avoid disputes and aim for automatic settlement based on pre-defined formulas.

 

The verification of energy against the contractual baseline can be assisted by IoT devices (sensors) as well as submetering technology which automatically transfers data to a platform where settlement can be automated without any human intervention, measurement, verification or transfer. It is crucial that the algorithms, sensors, and settlement is fully automated and that the energy savings coins are issued upon sensor verification.

 

This paper discusses these issues in more detail and explores our vision for the use of blockchain in the energy or water savings industry.