Blockchain Technology for Financial Services Facilitation in RES Investments

In the last years the interest around blockchain technologies is increasing. The peculiarity of this technology is to offer some relevant features as decentralization, transparency and reliability by design. Initially the application field was principally the financial one, but over the time many others have been investigated. In this paper we are reporting a real case of study in the financial sector, applied to the renewable energy exchange in a local district. In particular, this study reports the development of a Financial Platform, based on a private implementation of Ethereum blockchain, that enables a series of services for Renewable Energy Sources (RES) investments. The Platform implements a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) trustable energy marketplace, price-based, addressing both the RES Financial investors and the district energy prosumers. The amounts of energy exchanged and their monetary counter values are represented by specific “tokens”, automatically exchanged by participants to track and record trades, ensuring auditability. The financial services offered to the investors range from an investment performance monitoring to more complex models of shared revenues and equity. The marketplace and all the participants within the microgrid are nodes of the blockchain. All the platform features were implemented exploiting Ethereum smart contracts, ensuring trustworthiness and transparency.