Mobile Payments for Wholesale Power Bills? Signet Makes It Happen.

The notion of individuals using mobile payments to pay a power bill isn’t really out of line. It’s not an outlandish development. However, this may be the first time we’ve ever heard of mobile payments being used for purchasing power at the wholesale level. That’s just what happened as American PowerNet put a digital payments system to work to purchase power for the state of Pennsylvania.

More specifically, American PowerNet turned to Signature Bank’s system, known as Signet, to make the arrangements. With Signet, American PowerNet could hit the renewable energy sector with digital representations of US dollars known as Signets. Signets populate the bank’s Signet Platform in real-time, using blockchain systems, which effectively turns the Signet into a kind of cryptocurrency pegged directly to the US dollar.

Meanwhile, American PowerNet, which has its own Verde Blocks platform, can effectively settle with power generators on a daily basis to determine the wholesale rate per day, using the Signets to cover the day’s charges.

This isn’t the only time that Signets have found their way into Pennsylvanian systems; both the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority have been working to put Signet into their own operations.

American PowerNet CEO R. Scott Helm noted “…This marks an important and revolutionary shift within the energy ecosystem, which has been underserved to date. Using Signet’s USD blockchain-based payments platform will enable significant transformation throughout the renewable energy space as it fully automates a process within a multi-billion industry that hasn’t witnessed change in decades.”

Normally here I would wonder if this is solving the wrong problem, but not this time. this is an excellent application of the blockchain. Since power prices at the wholesale level change routinely, especially in the renewables space—the amount of power generated depends on weather conditions like wind speed and total sun exposure—the price necessarily changes to reflect supply. With the blockchain system able to work like digitized dollars, it’s produced the means to make these kinds of rapid transactions that shift value as needed.

Once again, mobile payments illustrate their sheer utility—no pun intended—by serving as a means to buy power wholesale. It’s kind of amazing how it works, but when it does, it really does wonders.