Germany looks to blockchain to help decentralize their energy economy

The Deutsche Energie-Agentur, also known as DENA — the main governmental group responsible for energy innovation in Germany — is looking to move its energy ecosystem to a decentralized database.

“When infrastructure can’t go down - when the lights need to stay on - the systems you use need to be resilient, and decentralized technologies deliver that,” Parity Technologies head of public affairs, Peter Mauric, told Cointelegraph. Parity Technologies stands as one of the companies involved in DENA’s project. Mauric added:

“The concept of microgrids — smaller, decentralized energy grids to improve resiliency energy generation, storage and distribution — have been a focus for the energy industry for years, so we should not be surprised that similar decentralized approaches are being explored across the entire energy market.”

Working with over 20 other crypto and blockchain entities, Energy Web will build a distributed energy resource database for Germany at the request of DENA, an Oct. 13 blog post from Energy Web detailed, adding:

“The project will enable energy assets in Germany, such as thermostats, solar PV systems, batteries, and electric vehicle charging stations to undertake automatic registration with a decentralized ledger of identities, allowing their utilisation by the German grid for a range of services such as virtual power plants and frequency regulation.”

Germany’s energy innovation wing, combined with Energy Web and numerous blockchain and crypto companies, essentially want to digitize the country’s energy system by storing necessary components on a decentralized database.

One of DENA’s brass, Philipp Richard, explained in the post that the endeavor faces remaining hurdles in terms of setting the project into motion, although blockchain-based digital identities (which are currently undergoing testing) look favorable.

Built for the next generation of energy ecosystems, Energy Web’s open-source blockchain-based decentralized operating system, called EW-DOS, holds as a key component of the new decentralized database’s test model.

The project, however, plans to utilize multiple blockchains, and include technology from KILT Protocol and Parity Substrate — which come from BOTLabs and Parity Technologies respectively, the post said.

“As a core blockchain infrastructure development company, we are excited to be working closely alongside Energy Web and our partners to implement this solution for DENA using Substrate, the blockchain-building framework we built for Polkadot,” Mauric said. Polkadot has gained significant prevalence in the crypto space in recent weeks, seeing the price of its DOT asset rise dramatically.

The new project follows the inception of the Future Energy Lab, which is a broad, recently-announced move from DENA. This project is aimed toward developing a trio of initiatives — “a blockchain machine identity ledger (BMIL), a CO2 emissions visualization, and a smart contract register,” the post said.

UPDATE Oct. 13, 20:06 UTC: This article has been updated with added information and quotes from Parity Technologies.