General Electric's (GE) most recently published patent application integrates blockchain technologies into large-scale, power grid energy resources.

The power generation industry is experiencing a transitional phase, moving from a small number of large centralized power plants to a diversified network combining traditional power plants, renewable power generation, energy storage, and microgrids. This transition is not without its issues, further creating uncertainties in renewable energy resource availability as renewable power generation cannot be accurately forecast, nor is it completely absorbed by the power grid.

GE's solution: enabling Distributed Energy Resource (DER) controllers to share a condensed dataset with a group of secure ledgers. The ledgers use shared information from DER edge devices to calculate global quantities to share with all DERs. With this information available to all DERs, these global values can be used to calculate an updated condensed data set and update their estimate of optimal control action.

GE is no stranger to this technology, having established the Blockchain+ mission which focuses on introducing blockchain technologies into industrial use cases.