Blockchains promise transparent, tamper-proof and secure systems that can enable novel business solutions, bring significant gains and potentially disrupt well-established business models of energy system stakeholders. A central challenge in this early development stage of the technology lies in finding a way to identify opportunities, promising use cases, limitations and risks.

In this invitation-only webinar, we presented an overview of fundamental principles that underpin blockchain technologies, varying system architectures and distributed consensus algorithms. We highlighted use cases and current business solutions for the energy industry by providing a systemic review of the state of the art. Opportunities and challenges for numerous use cases were discussed, including emerging P2P energy trading, IoT applications and decentralised marketplaces.

This was followed by a discussion of the requirements for future development, challenges and market barriers the technology needs to overcome to get past the hype phase, prove its commercial viability and finally be adopted in the mainstream.