- IOTA joins hands with ElaadNL to create the first ever smart power grid
- The grid runs on IOTA’s tangle technology
- Users who charge their vehicles at a slower speed could earn IOTA tokens
ElaadNL, a smart charging infrastructure Lab founded by Dutch grid operators, announced on 14th February, 2019, on their website that they’ve have successfully devised a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a smart power gird for electric vehicles using the “Internet of Things” based IOTA.
According the post by ElaadNL, the PoC demonstrates the capability of a smart grid to not only consume power but generate as well as distribute it among community members.
The concept was based on the ‘Tangle technology’ by IOTA. Tangle is a third-generation blockchain technology which is a block-less, scalable, light-weight, distributed ledger. The technology helps in charging devices to autonomously decide whether the grid needs help in balancing the load.
The charging stations developed by ElaadNL also let one earn MIOTA tokens if they charge vehicles at lower speeds or at an off peak time. The announcement explains:
“The grid in this PoC will connect all devices to a particular area of the grid, along with the transformer supplying energy. If one or more devices lower their energy usage, they receive a few tokens of the IOTA cryptocurrency.”
Harm Van den Brink, distributed ledger technology expert at ElaadNL said:
“This proof of concept shows a possible future electricity system where energy is shared amongst neighbours and decentralised islands are capable of balancing itself. We are using our electricity grid in total different way than we did 50 years ago; we went from only consuming to also producing energy.”
The company has reportedly installed 3000 public charging points inside Netherlands and soon plans on expanding offshore too. This marks a revolutionary step for the automobile sector as well as for IOTA.
IOTA and Energy
IOTA has also been seen making a lot of moves in the energy sector.
Just this January, ‘Energinet’, a Danish state owned Energy Company expanded its partnership with IOTA. The team plans on studying the various real-time use cases of their technology in new areas. IOTA’s product is based around IoT, and Energinet is looking to create new solutions using IoT to meet the demands of Green Energy and Electric Vehicles.
IOTA is a unique cryptocurrency which doesn’t run on the blockchain but rather on its on Tangle technology that is a type of directed acyclic graph which could achieve zero-fee transactions.
On paper, IOTA has a lot of things going on as well for the future and they have partnered with some industry giants like Audi and Bosch. ElaadNL is one of the very first times that the technology is being utilized in a real-time use case. This could be marked as a milestone in the company’s long run.
