Energy Consumption Tokens for Blockchain-Based End-to-End Trading of Green Energy Certificates

Abstract

In many regions of the world, energy attribute certificates (EACs) are created, stored and traded by means of centralized registries. These systems, which are often accused of being used for “greenwashing”, are usually country-specific and pose prohibitive administrative and economic barriers for small energy producers or prosumers. Blockchain-based approaches are widely considered an open, decentralized, transparent and more granular alternative. One of the technically mature solutions is Energy Web Origin. While this platform implements the concept of electricity generation devices, it does not provide any means of tying the use of an EAC to a point of consumption, such as a smart meter, a data center, or an industrial facility. To mitigate this limitation, we propose an extension of the Energy Web Origin system by an architecture that utilizes a consumption token based on the Ethereum ERC-721 standard. We assess the technical feasibility and scalability by measuring the amount of computing power (“gas”) required to run this extension on the Energy Web Chain.