The Department of Science and Technology (DST) had awarded a project on creating a blockchain-based platform for enabling peer-to-peer electricity trading to an academia-industry consortium led by IIM Ahmedabad, under the Smart Grids innovation challenge of the Mission Innovation (MI) initiative. Mission Innovation is a global initiative of 24 countries and the European Commission to reinvigorate and accelerate innovation with the objective of making clean energy widely affordable.
The project aims to increase transparency and efficiency in power sector transactions through application of blockchain concepts in power trading at the consumer level. This assumes special significance due to large amount of distributed renewable power generation systems being implemented as a national policy by the Centre. The blockchain use cases are being developed in consultation with industry and academic partners.
The DST has organised an interaction meeting, attended by officials from ITE&C Department, Government of Telangana, and a principal investigator for the project from IIM Ahmedabad.
The Telangana government has a Blockchain District Initiative, through which such projects are promoted, incubated and nurtured across sectors. The State government and IIM-A will collaborate to develop the blockchain platform for peer-to-peer energy trading and deploy the pilot solution in Telangana. The collaboration will demonstrate successful use cases for blockchain technology in the power sector.