Uses blockchain, Kafka and MongoDB in green energy trading

Energy trading platform Powerledger is among a growing number of blockchain technology providers that have ridden the renewable energy wave.

The Western Australian company offers various services built on its blockchain-based energy trading platform, facilitating peer-to-peer (P2P) trading of excess electricity from rooftop solar installations, mounting multiple household batteries to virtual power plants and purchasing renewable electricity from a specific supplier.

It even allows a participant to give their excess solar energy to a customer in another country on a reciprocal basis between related parties in opposite hemispheres, or as a gift to family members living in a country where electricity prices are high relative to income.

As with any blockchain platform, it provides traceability with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing renewable energy certificates (RECs), so participants can be confident that the electricity they are buying is indeed from a renewable source.

The company works in collaboration with electricity retailers, but offers a decentralized rather than the conventional unidirectional market. Benefits include reduced customer acquisition costs, increased customer satisfaction, better prices for buyers and sellers (compared to feed-in and supply tariffs), and the ability to trade across retailers.

Vivek Bhandari, chief technology officer at Powerledger, said that while there are existing markets for RECs, they are opaque with prices set by brokers. An organization may be committed to purchasing 100% of its electricity from renewable sources, but there may be times when it has no choice but to use conventionally generated electricity. When that happens, it has to buy RECs to compensate.

Powerledger’s market is transparent, and is much faster than transactions done through brokers, Bhandari said. Furthermore, it can cope with situations where supply data is subsequently updated, and offsets must be bought or sold to balance the customer’s consumption.

To date, Powerledger has operated at a relatively small scale, but there are billions of users in the addressable market, so the company had to identify technology that would be reliable at hyperscale.

It already used Apache Kafka as a core part of its infrastructure, specifically to ingest data from smart electricity meters and feed it into the trading system. To cope with the expected scale, and to help adopt an event-driven architecture, it turned to Kafka specialist Confluent.

Founded by the creators of Kafka, Confluent is used as the foundation for scalable real-time applications at companies like Netflix and about 80% of the Fortune 100, said Confluent’s vice president of Australia and New Zealand, Gavin Jones.

Examples of such applications include detecting potentially fraudulent credit card transactions, automatically blocking access to systems when a user’s behavior resembles a breach in progress, and determining that equipment requires preventive maintenance.

Confluent offers the most complete edition of Kafka, Jones said, with the scalability, security and high availability needed for critical applications. Furthermore, it can be used on-premise, in the cloud or as a fully managed cloud service on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

The managed service means customers spend less time on the backend systems, allowing them to gain insight into their data more quickly.

What Powerledger does “is not trivial” because of the combination of internet-of-things (IoT), network monitoring, blockchain and more, Jones said, suggesting that few energy providers can achieve anything similar.

MongoDB is another important part of Powerledger’s infrastructure. The company provided Powerledger with a proof-of-concept showing that the combination of MongoDB and Confluent could handle 100 million electricity meters with the ability to scale even further, MongoDB regional vice president Anoop Dhankhar said.

Bhandari claimed the system has been resilient so far, with no data lost when tested to the point of failover. He also described the combination of the two products as “very powerful” when it comes to security. And with the need to store data onshore to meet regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), “the integrity of the data becomes very important”, he added.

Both Confluent and MongoDB are certified to a level that allows use by security-conscious government agencies, Jones said, so Powerledger didn’t have to worry about that, focusing instead on its business model and applications.

Addressing this topic, Dhankhar noted that even GDPR’s “right to be forgotten” provision is accommodated by MongoDB, so Powerledger and other users can rest assured that they can comply with the rules and regulations that apply in different countries.

The relationship between Confluent and MongoDB extends to reference architectures that address a variety of situations, including cloud migration, application modernization and IoT, Jones said, and the integration provided by the two companies “is a huge benefit” to customers, allowing them to harness the power of real-time technology.

In Powerledger’s case, it not only provided the scalability required, but also simplified the integration of multiple applications, reducing both time-to-market and operational costs.