- The future is selling solar power to a neighbor with a Tesla
- Utilities see both opportunity and threat in new technology
If utilities think rooftop solar panels and batteries are bad for business, blockchain should scare the bejeezus out of them.
That’s because in addition to helping more people slapl panels on their rooftops — which eats into power sales and taxes grids — the distributed, digital ledger that’s proliferated across industries can also be used to trade electricity without a utility even knowing it. Imagine your neighbor with a solar panel directly selling you cheap power to charge your Tesla.
Sure, there are some utilities that see the future and are trying to use blockchain to their advantage, but others ignoring it may soon start losing business to new hyper-local energy suppliers with a powerful tool to manage billions of data points cheaper and faster.
Bloomberg Technology
By Chris Martin
April 9, 2018, 4:01 AM PDT