Residents of Upscale Bangkok neighborhood trade energy with blockchain

Australian solar startup Power Ledger, the developer of a peer-to-peer (P2P) energy marketplace on a blockchain, has started a trial in Bangkok to enable its residents to buy and sell solar electricity.

Power Ledger, together with Thai renewable energy business BCPG, have launched a world-first peer-to-peer (P2P) renewable energy trading trial at the T77 urban precinct in Bangkok, Thailand.

Power Ledger’s P2P platform will be used to trade up to 635KW of BCPG solar PV energy capacity between four participating entities at T77, demonstrating the efficient trading of renewable energy in order to lower energy costs for consumers.

The announcement builds upon the December 2017 agreement between BCPG and Power Ledger to bring distributed renewable energy trading to Thailand.

Centrally located off Bangkok’s famous Sukhumvit, T77 is an 8-hectare lifestyle precinct, the brainchild of leading Thai developer Sansiri, catering to both the Thai and international communities.

Participants in the energy trading trial include the Habito shopping mall, Bangkok International Preparatory & Secondary School, Park Court Serviced Apartments and Dental Hospital Bangkok.

BCPG will design and install the connections, meters and solar PV, while Power Ledger will provide its world-leading blockchain technology as the transactive layer across 18 meter points to monitor energy transactions between participants, enable P2P trading, generate invoicing, and evaluate the trading position of individual participants.

In an ASEAN first, Thai utility, the Metropolitan Electricity Authority (MEA), will allow access to their network for the physical transaction of energy and leverage metering data from Power Ledger’s platform for customer billing.

The aim of the trial is to provide a base case for future prospective projects in the region.

BCPG has also signed an agreement with the MEA to study the feasibility of a power distribution system and the development of the solar PV rooftops in the next two years.

BCPG, MEA and Power Ledger will demonstrate to the Thai, and wider ASEAN markets and related regulatory bodies that it can provide communities with lower-cost energy systems by allowing generating customers to monetize excess energy generation through selling energy to third parties.

Upon successful completion of the trial, Power Ledger and BCPG will deploy the solution across 31 other prospective projects with total power generation capacity of 2MW over a 3-year period.