Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Australia, energy trading technology company Powerledger aims to improve the efficiency of the energy market and enable peer-to-peer energy trading using blockchain's technology to track, trace, and trade energy, with technology now available in 12 countries.
Powerledger (POWR): Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading
Powerledger creates soft solutions and reduces energy costs and improves price transparency by establishing local energy markets (LEMs). This method reduces the strain on the grid, reduces abandonment and maintenance, and increases the resilience of the network.
Powerledger works with builders to include infrastructure in the design and construction of communities so that people living in the community can share in the renewable energy generated by the community's solar power, lowering their day-to-day energy costs and opening up new revenue streams by trading excess renewable energy across meters through its platform.
Powerledger has also been a major success in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. The Uttar Pradesh government partnered with Powerledger to pilot its technology in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of 200 million. As a result, the Powerledger platform set a purchase price for electricity that was 43 percent lower than the original retail price. The state then legislated to make peer-to-peer trading mandatory for all utilities.
Powerledger (POWR): Trading Energy for Beer
Victoria Bitter Brewing Company partnered with Powerledger to enable participants to track and trade their excess solar energy to power the Victoria Bitter Solar Swap program, where participants are rewarded with a Victoria Bitter beer delivered directly to their door.
Powerledger (POWR): Energy Attribute Vouchers
KEPCO, the Japanese electric utility, has partnered to set up shared meter data at eight participating sites in Osaka, Japan. The first phase provided the community with a cheaper energy system to offset existing energy costs and allowed generation customers to monetize their renewable energy investments by selling excess energy through peer-to-peer. In the second phase, KEPCO uses Powerledger's platform to create, track, and trade Energy Attribute Certificates (EACs) that will also be used to settle energy generated by rooftop solar systems.
As green power and zero carbon emissions are the future, Energy Attribute Certificates (EACs) that use blockchain technology to provide granular, immutable source details and fundamentally change the way they are created, purchased, and claimed, with full traceability and instant transfer of ownership and settlement, will also be the way forward.
Note: Energy Attribute Certificates (EAC ) are contractual instruments that represent and communicate all the attributes of renewable energy generation, and are an umbrella term for Green Power Certificates, which do not require that the electricity itself be sold with the attributes.
POWR/Sparkz Dual Token Model
Powerledger has issued two tokens, the POWR token is to provide on-chain governance and rewards and is open for node verifiers to pledge for rewards.
The other token, Sparkz, is an ecosystem stablecoin that is pegged to the value of the local currency used to purchase it and can only be used to buy and sell energy within the Power Ledger platform.Sparkz has no supply limit and is generated by exchanging fiat currency and then destroyed upon redemption.
According to CoinMarketCap, POWR has a total circulating supply of 48 million coins and is currently priced at approximately $0.1775 USD.