Analyst Insight: Residential Customer Behavior in Local Electricity Markets

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are slowly earning traction and legitimacy as useful tools to drive efficiency in the energy industry. A handful of vendors emerged from the boom-and-bust cycle of 2016 and 2017 and emerged with promising use cases and a portfolio of projects that demonstrate blockchain’s potential. 

Transactive Energy (TE) and peer-to-peer energy trading in distribution-level local energy markets has followed a similar cycle. Originally considered to be the most disruptive application of blockchain in the power sector, local energy markets (LEMs) have proven slow to implement in practice. But energy blockchain vendors and research groups have made a targeted effort to involve utilities in their projects to demonstrate that distribution-level trading can be integrated with existing grid systems.

This Guidehouse Insights report tracks global energy blockchain project deployments, use cases, and vendor activities. It covers 262 vendors and 333 projects across five global regions, and provides a broad and representative view of the energy blockchain market. The report also includes a case study of the Quartierstrom local energy market in Switzerland.