Residential solar customers are already used to selling power back to the grid. When their rooftop panels produce more electricity than is needed at any time, they can send the energy to the wider network and gain a credit on their utility bill in return. That process is called net metering. In the future, however, this process may seem somewhat controlled and anachronistic. Instead, we may sell power not only to utility companies but to each other.

That’s the vision of a European startup called WePower. The operative innovation behind the project is the blockchain, the decentralized ledger technology that first came to prominence as a way to track and record bitcoin transactions. Blockchains have since been adapted to trade all kinds of digital assets from loyalty points and insurance contracts to electrons.

By tokenizing renewable energy and putting it onto a blockchain, WePower is making that power tradable and accessible to anyone. And it’s giving people more control. In effect, people taking contracts on WePower become their own energy traders, substituting for the role utilities play in buying and selling power on our behalf. Instead of showing the price set by a utility, their bills will show the price they’ve negotiated on the platform.

Read the full article by Ben Schiller about block-chain energy on fastcompany.com