Russia’s Power Grid Company Tests Blockchain for Power Meter Data

Russia’s national power grid company Rosseti is testing a system for electricity bill payments based on a distributed ledger by Waves.

Waves Enterprise, the enterprise blockchain arm of the Russian DLT startup Waves, said in a blog post the pilot involves 400 households in two Russian administrative regions. 

In the next phase, which is expected to start in early 2020, the entire regions of Kaliningrad oblast and Sverdlovskaya oblast, with a combined population of about 5.3 million people, will use the system. The next step will be expanding it to all of Russia, according to Waves Enterprise. 

The system will access data from the power meters in houses and apartments, store it and distribute consumers’ payments between the company generating the electricity and the power grid operator, according to the announcement. This is intended to make the calculation of the payments more transparent and reduce what households owe for electricity, a debt that has reached over $12.5 million in Russia in 2019. 

Households will be able to see how much power they are using via an app and choose a more suitable tariff such as opting for one that provides a cheaper price during the night hours, according to the announcement. Rosseti has not commented the information by press time.  

A key factor for choosing Waves Enterprise was being based in Russia, said the advisor to the chairman of Rosseti, Sergei Semerikov.

“We believe the system should be developed on a private blockchain and on a platform developed in our country, meeting our demands for data protection and cryptography,” according to his statement. Also participating in the pilot is Russia’s largest privately owned bank, Alfa Bank.

Rosseti previously announced another local blockchain pilot in collaboration with Gazprombank, Russia’s oil and gas giant’s subsidiary, and the venture fund Digital Horizon.