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U.K.-based Power Transition today launched a crowdfunding exercise to raise the £300,000 it says it needs to scale up its blockchain-based, peer-to-peer energy trading platform beyond a 47-home demonstration project.

U.K. software company Power Transition has claimed the technology used in its ‘intelligent energy software platform’ is fast and energy efficient enough to unlock an energy system which will see actors from electric vehicle drivers to national grid networks trading power in a fully connected system.

Power Transition, which today launched a £300,000 (€336,000) crowdfunding investment round to scale up its technology, said its platform can accurately tag every kilowatt-hour of energy circulating in a system, from generation to consumption, for the first time. The Dover-based start-up, founded in 2018, claims its technology can function at any scale, from local networks up to national grids, and offers small scale renewables generators the chance to secure revenue from real-time peer-to-peer energy trading whilst enabling grid networks to balance capacity.

A press release issued on behalf of Power Transition today stated the distributed ledger technology (DLT), or blockchain, used for its software platform uses the Hedera Hashgraph system which is able to process individual transactions far faster than rival systems and at lower energy consumption.

Faster

The company, based on the English south coast, said Hedera Hashgraph can process 10,000 transactions per second, compared to three-per-second for the more famous Bitcoin blockchain system and the industry-standard 1,700-per-second offered by the Visa card payments service. With Visa transactions requiring 3 Wh of energy each – and Bitcoin a huge 250 kWh – Power Transition said its DLT required just 1 Wh per transaction.

Power Transition said its software platform has already been deployed as part of a demonstration project in Corby, in the English East Midlands, to enable peer-to-peer energy trading between 47 zero-carbon homes. That project was match-funded by government agency Innovate UK.

The start-up aims to raise £300,000 to scale up its technology with the help of partner organizations and has also announced an agreement with London-based local energy market Bank Energi to establish a central London marketplace between commercial energy users and public sector organizations including the National Health Service.