SMA Offers SolarCoin Crypto Cash
/15th February 2019, Jason Deign/ German solar inverter maker SMA Solar Technology this month gave 260,000 customers the ability to claim a cryptocurrency called SolarCoin in exchange for solar energy. The scheme, available as a feature in SMA’s Sunny Portal software for Webconnect and Sunny Home Manager customers, allows PV system owners to collect a SolarCoin for every megawatt-hour of solar energy produced.
The SolarCoin payment is in addition to whatever the solar installation owner might receive for the sale or exchange of their energy. Like most cryptocurrencies, the value of SolarCoin is highly volatile. Unlike bitcoin, however, SolarCoin’s value has remained at modest levels so far.
As of mid-February, the coins were trading at less than $0.03 per megawatt-hour of output. At its peak, in January 2018, each SolarCoin was worth a little over $2. The low value of the cryptocurrency hasn’t stopped solar producers from signing up, however. In January 2018, the renewable energy developer ACWA Power announced it was adopting SolarCoin for its 50-megawatt Bokpoort concentrating solar power plant in South Africa and a similar-sized PV plant in Bulgaria.
With SolarCoin at an all-time high, a GTM analysis showed the adoption of the cryptocurrency scheme could have been worth an extra 1.2 percent in revenue at Bokpoort. While the revenue stream is far from guaranteed, claiming it does not present much of a downside, other than some involvement from a company’s legal, financial and IT departments.
For SMA customers, the process is even easier: They just accept some terms of use in the Sunny Portal and the application automatically registers the customer for the scheme.
Original article text you may read here: SMA Offers SolarCoin Crypto Cash to 260,000 PV Owners
The more information about application of blockchain technologies in the renewable energy market you may read here: Europe Renewable Energy Market Reports 2018 - 2027
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