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Powerledger: Tokenised Sustainable Energy Trade on Blockchain

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations continue to dominate discussions in corporate boardrooms and startup offices. In the world of crypto, few projects are as relevant for sustainability and environmentalism as Powerledger (POWR). This is a platform that has moved beyond talk and onto serious action by enabling flexible trade in renewable energy. In this article, we explore Powerledger, a pioneer of sustainable energy trade on the blockchain.

Powerledger – Flexible Renewable Energy Trade

Powerledger (POWR) is a blockchain platform that facilitates the trade in renewable energy by individuals and organizations. Founded in 2016 in Australia, Powerledger is the pioneer of flexible trade in sustainable energy and new commodities like carbon credits. The platform was initially based on Ethereum but transferred to Solana in 2021. Powerledger isn’t an app on the Solana public network. Instead, it uses Solana’s capabilities to maintain its own private network with gated access. Solana acts as a general-purpose blockchain that can be used to spin off private networks using its technology. This is exactly how Powerledger operates.

Having its own network, with its own set of transaction validators and rules, allows Powerledger to customise its operational environment to the level that a simple Solana-based decentralised app cannot. Powerledger operated in the same format on Ethereum, i.e., as a private, protected network leveraging Ethereum’s base architecture.

Users of Powerledger, companies and individuals connected to energy grids, can tokenise and trade excess energy generated from sustainable resources like solar and wind. Those who buy clean energy offered via Powerledger can benefit by meeting their fluctuating energy needs as well satisfying their sustainable commitment and compliance targets.

However, Powerledger isn’t simply a platform for energy trade. It is a comprehensive environment that businesses can use for the majority of their sustainable energy operations – excess energy trading, provenance tracking, certification, and more.

All the operations and transactions related to energy trade or the use of other services like energy source tracking involve the use of POWR, Powerledger’s cryptocurrency. POWR is instrumental in tokenising energy and other products on the platform.

Why Blockchain and Crypto for Renewable Energy Trade?

Some might be asking if blockchain and cryptocurrency are suitable media for sustainable energy trade. At the end of the day, blockchains like Bitcoin are notorious for their mammoth energy expenditure and negative environmental impact.

Powerledger uses its own variation of Solana’s highly energy-efficient Proof of Stake transaction validation mechanism. Proof of Stake blockchains, including Solana and certainly Powerledger, are known for having massively lower energy consumption requirements than older chains like Bitcoin that are based on the wasteful, even if highly secure, Proof of Work system.

As for using cryptocurrency and blockchain for energy trade, Powerledger’s blockchain-based model opens up enormous opportunities that are unlikely to be realised outside of a crypto-based environment.

Firstly, energy tokenisation is critical for having the necessary flexibility during the process of buying and selling excess energy. Cryptocurrencies ideally suit such tasks and environments.

Secondly, tokenisation aids in the process of energy provenance tracking. Tracing the origin of renewable energy and verifying its green nature aren’t trivial tasks in the age of rampant green-washing. The permanent, immutable, and transparent nature of the blockchain makes green-washing fraud much harder to pull off. When energy is first sourced from clean resources and tokenised, an immutable record is created on the blockchain. As the energy is resold, a verifiable, transparent trail of historical transactions emerges. This environment makes it both harder to fake energy origin details and, at the same time, very easy to quickly apply provenance checking procedures.

Powerledger’s blockchain-based tokenised energy trade has further benefits, in addition to flexibility and provenance tracking. One of these is increased opportunities for decentralised energy applications at local sites. Powerledger has partnered with numerous businesses and communities, both in its native Australia and around the globe, to implement customised renewable energy projects on small grids often owned by a business, community, or consortium of organizations.

Another benefit brought about by Powerledger’s model is the automation of energy trade and management processes via smart contracts. Managing, redistributing, buying, and selling energy are complex processes, and the platform’s smart contracts are ideally suited to effectively automate them.

The POWR Crypto & Its Outlook

Given the worldwide push for greener energy and Powerledger’s leading position in this category of the crypto market, it is highly likely that this blockchain platform will keep growing solidly in the years to come. As noted earlier, the POWR token is critical for the functionality of Powerledger. Does that mean this crypto will also be a good candidate for growth?

Some cryptocurrencies, while being instrumental in their platforms’ business models, may not necessarily experience price growth in line with the expansion and success of their blockchains. These are typically utility tokens that have little applicability beyond enabling some transactional processes on the platform. As such, they hold limited investor value.

POWR, however, is quite different from these cryptocurrencies. Besides being used as a utility token on Powerledger, POWR is also the platform’s staking coin. Holders of POWR can stake their tokens on a Powerledger validator node to earn part of the crypto rewards generated by the validator. Powerledger validators are all institutional entities that are well-known in the industry or have a track record of supporting sustainable projects. They are instrumental in the functioning of the Powerledger blockchain. The staking functionality helps ordinary holders of POWR tokens have an influence on Powerledger via the stake delegation process.

In other words, POWR is a crypto that is so instrumental to the platform that, in our view, it is highly likely to grow more or less in line with the project’s overall expansion.

The token’s recent performance has also been very solid – over the last 12 months, POWR has appreciated by 114%, while in just the last 3 months, it has grown by a spectacular 80%. It looks like investors are starting to notice this crypto. Powerledger, with its focus on sustainable energy trade, was bound to be discovered. The year 2024 might be the platform’s time to shine on the crypto market’s centre stage.