Agnieszka Hołownia-Niedzielska is a Senior Blockchain Solutions Consultant at Espeo Software, where she helps enterprises design distributed systems that improve efficiency and transparency.
Powering a World That Can’t Go Dark
Imagine daily routines like cooking, brewing coffee, or opening your garage, stopping abruptly. Minutes without power disrupt life, while prolonged outages shut down businesses. Reliable electricity is essential for modern life.
In April 2025, Spain and Portugal lost about 15 gigawatts of supply within seconds, cutting power to tens of millions and forcing a multi-hour restoration despite cross-border support. In 2019, a transmission error left about 48 million people across Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay without electricity. Events of this scale, measured alongside reliability indices such as SAIDI and SAIFI, show how a single failure can cascade quickly across modern grids.
Modern economies depend on stable electricity. As networks grow with new renewables and millions of prosumers, grid balance becomes harder. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects over 5,500 GW of new renewable capacity by 2030, putting unprecedented stress on coordination and management. This highlights the urgency for innovative tools to ensure stability.
This need for better grid management creates an opportunity for new technologies.
A Complex Industry That Mirrors Finance
The energy market resembles the financial system in one important way: it is built on transactions and trust. Electricity passes through a chain of producers, operators, traders, distributors, and consumers. Each step creates data, contracts, and settlements.
Consider a single kilowatt-hour used in a Swiss office. Coal might be mined in another country, transported by sea, burned in one region, and transmitted through national and municipal grids before reaching a laptop charger. That simple act involves half a dozen organisations, each with its own records, invoices, and intermediaries.
Such complexity increases costs and risk. In many grids, transmission and distribution losses are around 5% of generation. Settlement inefficiencies cost suppliers hundreds of millions each year. If one point fails, the system slows or stops. Blockchain’s transparent ledger can simplify this.
What Blockchain Brings to Energy
Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology (DLT), records transactions across a shared network instead of a single database. Each participant holds a verified copy of the same information. Data cannot be changed without consensus, which is especially valuable in critical sectors like energy.
Combined with the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain lets energy systems collect and verify real-time data on how much power is produced, where it goes, and who consumes it.
Smart contracts, small pieces of code on the blockchain, can automatically settle payments or trigger actions such as buying power from a cheaper source. For executives, this automation translates directly into measurable outcomes: shorter Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), lower reconciliation costs, and improved working-capital efficiency.
Clearing transactions in seconds instead of days improves cash flow and reduces exposure to dispute-related write-offs. This is the kind of KPI improvement any CFO notices.
At Espeo Software, our team has delivered blockchain systems for automating settlements and compliance, proving the same principles can be applied in the energy market for efficiency gains.
Note on sustainability: Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, most enterprise-grade blockchains use energy-efficient consensus mechanisms like Proof of Stake or Proof of Authority. They require minimal computational power and can help achieve sustainability goals rather than undermine them.
Automating Settlements and Billing
Behind every electricity bill is a web of micro-transactions. Power producers, transmission operators, retailers, and regulators exchange data and payments. These processes often rely on outdated systems.
In a Netherlands pilot with TenneT and IBM, the blockchain platform streamlined access to EV and battery flexibility, reduced back-office complexity, and showed how automated settlements could become viable in distributed energy networks. While detailed cost-reduction figures are not publicly disclosed, the project demonstrated the model’s potential at utility-scale.
Our experience with global financial clients shows that these automated settlement frameworks can be safely adapted to the energy sector.
Cutting Out Intermediaries: The Rise of Peer-to-Peer Energy
Energy distribution has long depended on centralised systems. With rooftop solar panels and home batteries, individuals now produce energy too. Blockchain lets them trade it directly.
In the Brooklyn Microgrid project, households sell excess solar power to neighbours through a blockchain platform. Each transaction is recorded, verified, and executed automatically — without a utility acting as a middleman.
Similarly, Australia’s Power Ledger lets communities trade renewable energy locally. This peer-to-peer (P2P) model reduces transmission losses, keeps energy profits within communities, and increases overall efficiency.
Blockchain makes this possible by providing the infrastructure for trust, even between strangers, something previously only possible through central utilities.
Balancing Supply and Demand
Energy must be produced and consumed simultaneously. Too much supply overloads the grid; too little causes shortages. Managing this balance, often called flexibility, is one of the biggest challenges in modern power systems.
Finance offers a useful analogy: liquidity. When funds move too slowly through markets, economies stall. Blockchain helps banks manage liquidity through tokenised assets and instant settlement. In energy, similar mechanisms coordinate demand and storage.
The UK’s TraDER platform, developed by Electron and partners, uses blockchain to match surplus generation with available storage. If strong winds in Scotland produce more electricity than needed, the system redirects it to home batteries or electric vehicles, rewarding participants automatically.
Another example is the Energy Web Foundation (EWF), which provides open-source blockchain solutions for energy companies. Participants like Shell use its framework to automate communication between grid elements, improving response speed and reducing waste.
When blockchain integrates with IoT sensors and predictive analytics, grids can anticipate demand spikes, redistribute loads, and reduce downtime in real time.
Most energy infrastructures were not built with blockchain in mind. Blockchain does not replace legacy systems; it complements them. Integration typically happens in several structured steps. A structured integration plan and early system audits help mitigate compatibility or operational risks.
1. Data synchronisation: connect IoT devices, smart meters, and grid management systems to capture real-time consumption and generation data.
2. API or middleware layer: establish secure data bridges between legacy platforms such as SCADA or billing systems and the blockchain network.
3. Smart contract deployment: define the business logic, for example, settlement rules or flexibility incentives, on the distributed ledger.
4. Testing and gradual rollout: pilot within a defined region or process before scaling to full-grid integration.
5. Continuous monitoring: use analytics to validate data integrity and fine-tune performance.
These steps enable blockchain to work with existing infrastructure, providing automation and transparency while minimising disruption. Addressing integration challenges lets executives manage complex upgrades confidently.
Transparency and Sustainability
Beyond efficiency, blockchain strengthens sustainability by proving where energy comes from. Each unit of electricity can carry a digital certificate tracing — solar, wind, hydro, or fossil — and its route through the grid. Traceability supports renewable-energy certificates and carbon-credit systems.
Under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), large companies will for the first time be required to report detailed, auditor-ready sustainability information for the financial year 2024 (published in 2025). Blockchain gives companies the technical infrastructure to supply that level of data quality, making traceability a strategic enabler of compliance rather than just a best practice.
At Espeo Software, we see growing demand from clients who want verifiable sustainability data. Blockchain-based traceability ensures compliance and genuine accountability.
Data privacy considerations: Because energy data is sensitive, enterprise implementations use permissioned networks with clearly defined access rights. These frameworks maintain transparency while protecting commercially confidential or personal data — aligning with energy-sector and data-protection regulations.
The next stage of innovation, already in motion, focuses on monitoring the condition of energy infrastructure itself, ensuring a clean, safe, and resilient supply.
Learning from Finance
Blockchain’s potential in energy is not theoretical. The financial industry has already adopted it to improve settlement speed, reduce fraud, and increase liquidity. These tested solutions can inspire energy companies facing similar challenges of transparency and coordination.
Our experience implementing distributed ledgers in enterprise finance shows that mature frameworks, standards, and practices already exist. The energy sector can adapt these lessons without reinventing the wheel, a practical path to innovation.
Blockchain will not fix the energy market overnight. Scalability, interoperability, and regulation remain barriers, but they are also the next competitive frontiers for forward-looking energy leaders.
To seize these opportunities, executives can form industry consortia, pilot blockchain initiatives to gain insights, and partner with regulators to codify best practices.
Each step builds capability and influence, positioning organisations to lead as the energy transition accelerates.
Adoption also depends on collaboration among utilities, regulators, and technology providers. Pilot projects have proven the value, but large-scale implementation requires shared frameworks, not isolated initiatives.
Still, these are engineering and governance challenges, not conceptual flaws. Pilot projects across Europe, North America, and Asia are already proving the model’s value. The next step is scaling from pilots to policy-supported deployment.
Conclusion: Building a Smarter, Fairer Grid
Blockchain gives the energy sector three strategic advantages:
- Fewer intermediaries enable direct peer-to-peer energy exchange.
- Automated settlements reduce cost and complexity in billing.
- Smarter flexibility management, balancing supply and demand dynamically.
Energy is a critical infrastructure. Any technology that improves resilience, transparency, and efficiency deserves attention. Blockchain does all three.
At Espeo Software, we help enterprises harness distributed systems to modernise operations and improve energy efficiency across value chains. For executives aiming to lead in energy innovation, a strategic blockchain rollout can deliver three measurable business outcomes:
- Cost reduction through automated settlements and lower transaction fees.
- Enhanced risk management with transparent, tamper-proof records.
- New revenue streams enabled by peer-to-peer energy trading.
If you want to explore what this could look like in your organisation, book a 30-minute blockchain readiness assessment with our specialists. Together, we’ll identify where automation and transparency can create the fastest impact and outline a practical pilot roadmap tailored to your needs.
The transition will not be easy, but it is underway. Those who adopt distributed systems early will shape how the energy market of the future operates, cleaner, fairer, and more reliable.
Stay on the block to stay ahead.
