Aussie tech digitises carbon credits in Silicon Valley

Australian tech company Power Ledger has partnered with Silicon Valley Power (SVP) to trial its carbon credit reporting tool C6 at an electric vehicle (EV) charging station in Santa Clara, California.

The trial linked Power Ledger’s blockchain-enabled platform to a 370 kW solar system and 49 EV charging stations at the six-storey parking station. Energy production and use was tracked to help SVP earn carbon credits under the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). Administered by the California Air Resources Board, the LCFS enables EV fleet owners or EV charging network operators to sell credits to fossil fuel refiners and producers. To date, these data have been collected and managed manually in spreadsheets; however, Power Ledger’s platform will automate this reporting process to make credit claiming more efficient.

At the Santa Clara site, EV charging transactions were digitally recorded as smart contracts on the blockchain platform, generating a digitised LCFS certificate containing a cryptographic hash of real-time data sent to SVP’s wallet, thus enabling the company to monetise its EV charging infrastructure.

Power Ledger Chairman Dr Jemma Green said, “This has been a pioneering project. Power Ledger and Silicon Valley Power have established a template for a blockchain-enabled solution for the measurement, reporting and verification of carbon credits, replacing a manual collection process that could often take months to validate. In the future, this could mean electric vehicle owners could make money out of their cars.

“Power Ledger and Silicon Valley Power have demonstrated a potential use case for creating a secondary market with digital exchange for tokenising and trading LCFS credits,” she said.

“Blockchain technology creates a decentralised marketplace, enabling a more efficient and transparent method for exchanging assets, including carbon credits,” Dr Green continued.

Power Ledger and SVP are now in discussions regarding commercial deployment of the system.

Image courtesy of Power Ledger.