General caveats and biases:
- there is ~1 blockchain, and it's called bitcoin
- markets improve everything, so its coming to energy
Now read this link: http://www.utilitydive.com/news/distributech-2017-why-utilities-are-skeptical-about-transactive-energy/436047/
Bit of blockchain-related jargon, but getting into the content above:
SCE’s strategy is to “push as much in the software as possible,” attempting to find tools that allow greater visibility and control over distributed resources on the system
Much easier to harvest digital assets, like a software-based currency bitcoin, rather than tedious endeavor of managing physical assets like batteries and diesel generators. At worst, using bitcoin mining hardware as a release valve for surplus electricity generation is a great short-term bet (while the kinks are ironed out around managing physical DERs).
Model something like: overshoot on production, sponge up excess with software (mining bitcoin).
utility’s current role more as an “integrator” than a command-and-control operator of DERs
the market will take over despite the best efforts of the utilities to get in the way. Will take longer than it should unless government intervention breaks up utilities (complicated, messy and therefore highly unlikely).
“I lived through 2000-2001 energy crisis as an energy trader, so I know people will be up to mischief if you don't design it correctly.”
So it's either a real market, or a fraudulent one. Guess which functions better? Comparing the potential of TE to Enron is silly.
You get down to those nodes and it just goes up exponentially in complexity
Avoid the complexities! Managing physical assets is hard, so why not focus on digital assets? By shifting energy in time with a digital asset like bitcoin, rather storage/generation carousel, the costs and complexity can potentially be reduced.
By allocating surplus energy to something that generates cash (bitcoin) -- without the explicit requirement to match demand from consumers/load in temporal fashion -- reduces complexity and lowers costs. Models need to be tested where excess power is mining bitcoin (in pools, ideally), which can then be sell at market (liquidated for cash) and then used to mitigate future generation costs.
A network of (location-specific) bitcoin-mining pools could be established by utilities in neighbouring areas. Geographic region(s) could allocate power collectively to bitcoin mining and immediately boost their economic outputs (more compute, more bitcoin).
multiple generating clients contribute to the generation of a block, and then split the block reward
The split is done according the contributed processing power. Pooled mining effectively spreads out the rewards more smoothly over time.
problem with pooled mining is that steps must be taken to prevent cheating by the clients and the server.
For an overview of the different types of pooled mining, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pooled_mining
This is pure speculation and has not been modeled or demonstrated empirically. If you have the numbers to support or refute this conjecture, please share them with me on Twitter @Royal_Arse.