Lawrence Orsini, CEO of LO3 Energy. Credit: Siemens
Siemens has invested in LO3 Energy, a Brooklyn-based energy tech company building a platform for local peer-to-peer energy marketplaces. The unspecified investment closed out LO3’s series A funding round, Utility Dive reported.
LO3 plans to use the funding to develop technology that allows local energy trading over microgrids using blockchain, Greentech Media’s Katie Fehrenbacher reported. Blockchain is a distributed public ledger of cryptocurrency transactions where information gets linked together in blocks. It is perhaps best known as the foundation for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
Both Siemens and LO3 see significant potential in blockchain for buying and selling energy. “LO3’s Exergy platform is based on a decentralized ledger that uses cryptographic technology to save data in a way that is tamper-proof and enables the automated execution of contracts in a scalable manner,” the companies said in a joint press release.
This isn’t the first time Siemens and LO3 have teamed up. In 2015, the companies began working together on the Brooklyn Microgrid, a community microgrid project that began allowing users to buy and sell energy from rooftop solar panels in early 2016.
Lawrence Orsini, CEO of LO3 Energy, told Greentech Media the company has already built a pilot blockchain-enabled microgrid in Brooklyn that is operating now and will officially go live in the second quarter of this year. Currently the Brooklyn Microgrid connects around 60 rooftop solar sites, and approximately 500 consumers participate in buying and selling electricity from those systems, Fehrenbacher reported.
“Self-sufficient microgrids play an important role in an energy market that is growing through distributed energy systems — whether they are based on wind, sun, water or biomass,” the joint press release from Siemens and LO3 Energy says.
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