The project will be launched in Italy, Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland and will help stabilize the electricity infrastructure by allowing families to make money from the batteries in their homes and cars.

Blockchain technology makes its debut in the management of the electricity grid in a project born of European cooperation.

Let's talk about Equigy, an intelligent cross-border platform created to help maintain system flexibility. The initiative bears the signature of three major network operators: Terna, TenneT and Swissgrid. Together, the companies will experiment with new software that uses blockchain technology to validate and archive "energy transactions" between batteries and the grid.

The Problem Behind

The decarbonisation process is progressively increasing the spread of wind and photovoltaics. But non-programmable renewable sources, precisely because of their unpredictability and inconstancy, are able to decrease the flexibility of the electrical system. Without adequate countermeasures, green production peaks or their shortages run the risk of creating electrical surges or blackouts.

To increase the flexibility and stability of the network, there is no single solution but a set of tools. And among these also appears Equigy. The idea behind the platform is to use the small distributed resources to ensure that the energy required is always balanced by that produced. Instant by instant, without "holes" or congestion.

In detail, Equigy is a "crowd balancing platform" (CBP), ie a network balancing platform that operates by involving small consumers (crowd). When fully operational, it will link the resources distributed to the supply of dispatching services, such as electric vehicles or residential storage units. At the same time it will involve the other stakeholders of the supply chain such as aggregators and Original Equipment Manufacturers, allowing the extended enabling of new flexibility resources to support the Electricity System, with a view to scaling and standardizing processes by the major European TSOs.

For this purpose, the platform uses the blockchain to "record and validate" the individual "energy transactions" between car batteries or residential storage with the network. This will allow families and businesses to be paid for these transactions depending on the time of day and the applicable electricity price.

"Equigy - explains Terna - represents an intersectoral effort aimed at establishing a new European standard for the flexibility markets by breaking the barriers, especially economic ones, which so far have hindered the participation of non-traditional resources". The platform will initially be launched in four markets (Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland), to then be extended to other countries, such as Denmark where the TSO Energinet has already expressed its interest in joining.