Analyst Insight: Energy Blockchain Applications in Smart Cities

Since 2012, Guidehouse Insights has tracked 444 total energy blockchain projects and 304 unique vendors. Of those 444 projects, 9% employ blockchain technology for supply chain management (SCM). For comparison, transactive energy (TE) remains the top use case in the energy blockchain space, with 40% of all projects aimed at using blockchain technology to provide an open energy trading marketplace. Deployment of SCM projects has remained steady since 2018, with an average of 10 projects announced each year.

Guidehouse Insights defines a smart city as “a city characterized by the integration of technology into a strategic approach to improving citizen well-being, environmental sustainability, and economic prosperity.” Smart cities take advantage of innovations in digitization and automation to rise to that challenge and to deliver services to their citizens quickly, efficiently, and securely. Blockchain technology is one such innovation. Blockchain can bring authenticity of information to be verified mathematically providing a trustless database and system. In a smart city, these attributes can produce benefits for everything from document provenance (e.g., public land ownership or private health records) to cybersecurity, transportation, and TE.

Smart cities programs and projects are expanding worldwide, creating sandbox environments that can evaluate and incubate emerging technologies like blockchain. This report combines insights from Guidehouse Insights’ Smart City Tracker and Energy Blockchain Vendor and Deployment Tracker with three case studies that demonstrate blockchain’s potential benefits as one tool available to city managers adapting to the digital transformation.