Market Highlight – Blockchain opens up alternative energy market.

Blockchain technology could open a new market for households and other small-scale renewable energy producers by offering a cheap and secure way for households and other small-scale producers to certify their electricity production and track transactions.  Lots of companies are keen to prove their eco-credentials by buying renewable energy certificates (RECs) to offset the carbon-intensive electricity they use. Unfortunately, certifying RECs is cumbersome and expensive, putting it beyond the reach of smaller producers. The problem is a bottleneck in transaction processing. Currently, blockchain can only support a few hundred transactions per second, because before a block of transactions is confirmed, several servers must agree on its contents. When those servers are scattered around the world, delays and communication failures can slow down that process. 
Dr. Srinivasan Keshav and his colleagues at the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy (WISE) – based at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, have created a solution which they call Canopus. By ensuring that the servers which verify a particular block are near one another, Canopus speeds up communication. The researchers are now creating a prototype Canopus-driven blockchain they anticipate could handle more than a million transactions per second.