Digital platforms and blockchain

Market-based approaches reflect local scarcity or overproduction through prices. Unlike centralized power exchanges, they allow supply and demand to be matched both spatially and temporally, taking individual preferences into account. This means consumers only pay as much as the capacity is worth at a given time and place. There have already been initial pilot projects in Wuppertal, Switzerland, and Brooklyn.

Clearing House or Peer-to-Peer-Markets

Platform-based digital markets can either function as a local power exchange (“clearinghouse”) or have a completely decentralized structure. The latter is called peer-to-peer markets – meaning “like-minded people” trade among themselves. One example is blockchain combined with “smart contracts”: End-users, producers, and prosumers, who both generate and consume electricity, for example, via photovoltaic systems, can communicate and trade electricity safely even without central exchanges.

However, such mechanisms only work when applications are automated. For example, automated forecasting and control models based on artificial intelligence make real-time decisions and implement them independently. In this context, there is room for innovative solutions and business models (“analytics as a service,” “software as a service,” for example, integrated and automated trading and control solutions). The charging cycles for electric cars, e.g., can be controlled fully automatically via smart-charging applications, based on price signals and individual preferences.