The World Energy Council has produced its blockchain-focused World Energy Insights Brief 2018. After consulting with 39 global energy leaders and stakeholders, the report finds that blockchain is in its infancy, but it could have an immediate impact and holds the potential to “upend” the global energy system.
The new paper, produced in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers, was delivered at World Energy Week in Milan, Italy, last week. It follows a previous World Energy Council (WEC) report in 2017, titled "The Developing Role of Blockchain."
Rather than a scientific or statistically based approach, the WEC interviewed 39 companies and organizations with the goal of understanding what stage of maturity blockchain has reached in the energy sector, the technology's potential, and possible impediments. The interviewees range from innovative companies and traditional oil and gas businesses to regulators and utilities.
The report did not state how many, or what percentage, of interviewees represented companies investigating use cases. However, of that unspecified sample, the WEC found that 85 percent of companies investigating blockchain use cases said they were in the early stages and mostly had immature blockchain pilots. The authors estimate that between $100 to $300 million dollars was invested in 2017 in blockchain development for the energy sector alone. However, this amount is relatively small in comparison to the sector's total investment in broader digital infrastructure, which reached $47 billion the same year.
These blockchain projects and pilots-in-progress range from energy trading platforms, emissions trading systems, and peer-to-peer (P2P) trading to supply chain applications, tokenization and project financing systems, and even off-grid bitcoin mining. A majority of the projects in development involve P2P trading and emissions trading systems, with blockchain-based solutions to P2P trading accounting for 45 percent of the total.
