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NETWORK / 14 / JUNE 2018 BLOCKCHAIN C osts of renewable energy technologies have been decreas- ing rapidly in recent years, enabling home and land own- ers to generate and store their own energy for use or sale back to the energy grid. According to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), the share of renewables within the UK's energy mix in- creased by 16.7 to 29.4 per cent during 2017 relative to the year before. There is a trend towards and optimised to ensure we can keep the lights on during even - ing periods when the wind isn't blowing. In 2017 the UK Government put policy in place which will see the banning of sales of new diesel and petrol vehicles by 2040. This policy places a huge burden on our future energy system, with demand for energy for vehicle charging typically aligning with current peak energy demand. The sheer scale and speed of these changes requires an in - Real time data to incentivise behaviour Damien Canning, head of technical sustainability at Costain, talks about the advantages that distributed ledger technology can bring to the energy sector. credible amount of coordination of actors at all levels within the energy system. In my opinion, such coordination can most effectively be achieved through collection and dissemination of real time capacity, generation, consumption and cost data to enable incentive mechanisms to be developed for installation of additional capacity, shiŒing of consumption to lower demand times and optimal tariff selec - tion. In short, there is a need for a tracking technology which not only maintains a record of transactions, but can provide system users with real time price, supply and demand data at a local level so as to incentiv - ise behaviour beneficial to the whole system; enter blockchain, which is an open distributed ledger technology (DLT). Distributed ledger technology Typically, we hear the term blockchain bandied about in connection with cryptocurren- cies and financial bubbles. To put it simply, distributed ledger decentralisation of the energy system, which will continue to accelerate with improvements in renewable technologies, such as increases in solar panel efficiency (from 17.8 per cent in 2012 to 29.8 per cent in 2016) and as costs continue to decline. While the upsurge in renew- able energy generation is having a positive impact upon the UK's emissions, intermittency issues mean that multiple storage technologies and incentive mechanisms for balancing de - mand will need to be developed