China’s State Owned Electricity Monopoly to Utilize Blockchain Technology

Apr 10, 2018 at 23:56

The State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), the country’s state-owned electricity utility monopoly, is planning to utilize the blockchain technology in order to implement its planned “Internet of Energy.”

In a patent application filed to the China State Intellectual Property Office, SGCC has detailed its exploration of a blockchain-powered system that it claims can store and track information such as a consumer’s power consumption that can be shared in a decentralized manner.

The filing further explained that the idea behind Internet of Energy is to integrate more information about electricity consumption and generation onto the internet to facilitate data tracking on web-enabled devices.

SGCC also mentioned that since centralizing such system may incur higher operational costs and higher risks of security breaches in handling a large amount of data, a decentralized system is proposed that can pass newly generated data through a hash function and store the results on a tamper-proof blockchain.

Earlier this month, Sinochem, China’s state-owned petrochemical giant, completed a trial that used blockchain technology to export gasoline from the Chinese city of Quanzhou to Singapore.

On the other hand, the Bank of China, one of the four state-owned commercial banks in the country has patented a solution that it said to be capable of solving scaling issues that confront blockchains.