An energy industry blockchain ‘hackathon’, hosted by technology company Electron, was won by Octopus Energy. Their concept used the blockchain asset register and smart contracts to tackle some of the issues faced by customers with pre-payment meters.
The one-day event on 6 February, dubbed the ‘kWhackathon’, gave software developers and other energy professionals the opportunity to access the Electron’c blockchain energy asset register, designed to be a single source of technical data.
The asset registration platform includes data such as electricity and gas meter supply points across the UK.
The kWhackathon saw 15 teams compete to create new innovative products and services for the platform. The winning application took six hours to build. Greg Jackson, chief executive of Octopus Energy, said “We founded Octopus not as an energy company but as technology business that sells energy. … tech companies like Octopus can revolutionise dinosaur sectors like retail energy.”
Other prizewinners included
- A coalition of companies led by Northumbria Living Water, for ‘Net Benefit’ – smart contracts to enable ‘storage as a service’.
- ‘UG’ from Utility Warehouse for their proposed EV charging solution, ‘Snappy’.
- An honourable mention for team ‘Desire’ (Decentralised Social Register), with individuals from Centrica, Halo Cleantech, University College Cork, Wheatley Solutions and West Sussex County Council. They proposed a new way of co-ordinating priority service registers.
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