Prof David Shipworth's Inaugural Lecture 'Transactive Energy: Turning the energy system outside-in'

Distributed models of energy generation and supply-demand matching are increasingly viewed as an integral component of both a more robust and a decarbonised energy system. Transactive energy represents one way of achieving this through seeking to locally match supply and demand at the community level through peer-to-peer energy transactions. Its proponents argue that it provides social, environmental, economic, and energy systems benefits. Such transactive energy schemes are emerging around the world in response to the rapid uptake of local renewable energy generation through PV and wind, and will be further enabled by the anticipated rapid uptake in electricity storage. Transactive energy potentially represents a fundamental change in the physical and financial configuration of the energy system creating winners and losers both in the business ecosystem and across consumer groups. This lecture will assess the potential impact of transactive energy models. It will introduce some of the underlying enabling technologies (such as blockchains), assessing their strengths and limitations and the critical role of their system architecture in ultimately determining who may benefit from their introduction. It will also assess potential customer value propositions to ask what’s in it for the rest of us.