Energy innovations through blockchain: Challenges, opportunities, and the road ahead

As a secure distributed ledger, blockchain has attracted a great deal of attention over the past decade. The power sector is not an exception to this phenomenon and industry leaders are looking into different ways to create value through this technology. Blockchain is a powerful enabling technology for decentralization of the energy systems of the future. Although this technology can be applied to a wide spectrum of applications in the power sector, many challenges and limitations are still needed to be addressed before its full implementation into grid operations. This paper presents energy innovations through the blockchain technology and addresses the barriers that preclude the power sector from large-scale, full-scope adoption of this technology. The emerging blockchain trends in near future will be further discussed and its potential in facilitating a secure, decentralized energy trading platforms will be investigated in this paper.