Breaking news from legacy auto maker Toyota shows that leaders there are poised to roll out an interesting new blockchain system with the University of Tokyo and a renewable energy company called Trende that will allow stakeholders to automate the trading of electricity using blockchain technology.
“The pilot, scheduled for June 17, will reportedly test a peer-to-peer electricity system that allows homes, enterprises and electronic vehicles that are connected to the power grid to trade electricity using blockchain,” reports Marie Huillet at Cointelegraph this morning. “The initiative will reportedly be focused on Toyota’s Higashifuji Technical Center and the surrounding area.”
In Japan, as federal officials are trying to navigate a move toward green energy, involved parties are also moving from a centralized electrical supply system to one that operates on a decentralized model. A May 23 press release on the project explains:
“As distributed power supplies such as solar panels, secondary batteries, and electrified vehicles become increasingly widespread, Japan’s electricity supply system is in a transitional state … The objective of the test is to verify the economic advantage of having prosumers, (italics ours) who generate electricity with their own distributed power supply, trade electricity with electricity consumers, via an electricity exchange market, at prices that reflect supply and demand conditions, and to assess the feasibility of a two-way, self-autonomous electricity supply system that allows direct trading with other prosumers.”
The press release describes placing an artificial intelligence ‘electricity trading agent’ in each household or business and connecting these entities into a network to allow for the automated trading activity:
“The electricity trading agent places orders to buy and sell electricity in an electricity exchange based on electrical consumption and forecasts of electrical power to be generated by solar panels at households and businesses. Electricity transactions between individuals are implemented using a defined algorithm that matches buy and sell orders that are collected in the electricity exchange from each household and business.”
This project could be big news for crypto investors who are also focused on green energy stocks and the general search for solutions to the world’s climate change problem.
Many traders are not strangers to the idea of creating ideological trades – investing in equities and securities backing specific types of progress that the investor believes in wholeheartedly.
However, if you choose to ignore any of the technicals in pursuit of ideological investments, be prepared to weather some ideological losses.
Factor big plays like this one into your blockchain outlook when rebalancing your portfolio. Big names like Toyota can move markets and change the landscape of an industry, and this pilot project may end up being much more far-reaching than it currently appears.