Earning electric money on your house or building – as simple as Airbnb!
2021-08-17
Just owning a house with an energy system makes you a potential flexibility provider, which will be worth money in the flexible smart grid. In the IMCG coordinated Horizon 2020 project FlexiGrid we are developing a blockchain based platform for the flexibility market.
The EU-project FlexiGrid is developing different solutions to enable 100% renewable energy in the power grid. One important factor is the flexibility market, which is based on a blockchain platform that connects end-users such as industries and private energy producers, like solar rooftop owners, with the grid owners, i.e. the DSOs.
Like AIRBnB
If you have a house or an apartment, you can sometimes let someone rent it or parts of it and get some money for it through services that puts you in touch with buyers. The same thought goes for the trading platform within FlexiGrid.
“It is kind of like AIRbnb for flexibility. You have an asset in your home that you don’t need for the moment. Instead, you offer it to someone who needs it and earn money from it”, says Thong Vu Van, CEO of FlexiGrid partner EMAX and mastermind of the blockchain platform EFLEX.
Your house just gave you an extra income
With solar panels on your roof where you live, as a company with a property building or as a real estate owner you can already today sell your surplus electricity to the grid owner. What Thong Vu Van and EMAX now offers is not only to contribute with renewable electricity to the grid but also becoming a flexibility provider, helping the grid owner to avoid congestion in the grid and in the end prevent a system collapse of the grid. The choice of not using power at critical moments or of providing the grid with power when it needs it the most is becoming an asset.
Like Airbnb helps you provide rooms for tourists, EMAX’s platform, EFLEX, will help you sell the flexibility in your house’s energy system. A new simple way of earning money on your house or building!
In a near future where smart power grids have been established, the end-users will have the chance to be much more active. A house with electric heat pumps, a solar rooftop and an electric car can provide much of the valuable tools the grid companies want to gain flexibility from to avoid congestion and big investments in the grid.
In the FlexiGrid project the blockchain platform is just one of the many important pieces that are put together to make the grid ready for the electrification of society.
