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PONTON was honoured by the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) for its activities in the blockchain space and in particular for the initiation of the Enerchain project.

Over 40 energy trading organisation participated in the Enerchain PoC between June 2017 and March 2018. The goal was to develop a distributed trading platform for power and gas in Europe.

Apart from various live trades that were presented in public, several more were executed bilaterally between market participants over the blockchain platform. 

Results and lessons learned were compliled in the Key Insights Report: https://www.ponton.de/downloads/enerchain/EnerchainKeyInsights_2018-03-29_final.pdf

Next project steps are

• Form an Enerchain legal entity that represents the consortium and facilitates decision making / governance processes
• Agree on a set of contracts among project participants and with service providers
• Extend the Enerchain trading software for third parties that use the Enerchain API for the provision of add-on services such as trading front-ends, optiminsation functions, capacity trading etc.
• PONTON's WRMHL Framework is extended for use in further blockchain-based systems that require coordination of distributed applications

It is expected that these steps are reached by Q3 2018.

In February 2017, we held our first Enerchain workshop in Berlin. Back then, a group of forward-thinking representatives of European utilities met in Berlin to form their vision of Blockchain applications in energy trading. That first workshop is now eight months in the past – a lot has happened in such short time. Blockchain development seems to run at higher speeds than regular business. Here is an update, see also the latest press release from Sept 29th.

Expectations in Berlin were high and wide-ranging: lower transaction cost, P2P integration directly between market participants, reduced entry barriers for smaller market participants, a seamless process including not only trade execution but instantaneous settlement of transactions as well. Given these diverse goals, holding a critical mass of participants together seemed a challenge of a higher order.

Press Release: European Energy Trading Firms test peer-to-peer Trading over the Blockchain

Hamburg, May 29, 2017

23 [as of November 2017: 39] European energy trading firms have joined forces in order to conduct peer-to-peer trading in the wholesale energy market using innovative blockchain technology. Trading will take place on an enhanced Enerchain® framework – a blockchain based application developed by PONTON that has already been used to execute the first European energy trade over the blockchain at last year’s EMART conference in Amsterdam.

 When people talk about „Blockchain in Energy“ they usually have „P2P Trading“ in mind – either between households or between wholesale energy traders. P2P trading between households was intensively marketed by the „Brooklyn microgrid“ and today about 50 start-ups across Europe pursue this business idea. P2P trading between wholesale energy traders is one of PONTON’s blockchain-related focus (à Enerchain). In contrast, the operation of gas and power grids is much more a „B2B“ model, as grid processes are very detached from consumers perception („the power comes out of the socket“) and even energy engineers require decades to fully comprehend in full detail, how grids do actually operate.