Marubeni Corporation merges with LO3 Energy Inc. to commence a pilot project

Marubeni Corporation, a Japanese general trading company, has collaborated with a New York-based blockchain startup, LO3 Energy Inc., an energy-tech company, to utilize the technology for its energy business. The news was announced in a press release during the last week.

A Marubeni Corporation’s operation is not just limited to Japan, but over time they have also extended their activities into different countries which include the United States and Europe. Marubeni has around 130 representative offices spread across 66 countries. Further, the organization has selected LO3 Energy’s transactive energy platform as a base that can carry out a prevailing pilot project.

The Japanese firm is ranked as the country’s fifth largest sōgō shōsha — a form of a Japanese company which deals in various categories of products and materials.

LO3 Energy, a Brooklyn, NY based company, is creating a platform that would enable to disperse business models and innovative technologies pertaining to energy, “cleantech” and utility systems. The LO3 team has in-depth knowledge in various areas such as energy, computing, and peer-to-peer distributed consensus networks. The company creates different types of tools and grows projects efficiently to assist and enhance the rate of production of the distributed energy, utilities and asserting the sharing economy of the future. LO3 Energy has new projects which utilizes the transactive energy platform that has started in the Australian state of Victoria, in the UK and Texas, USA, adding to its existing projects in Germany, Australia, and New York.

LO3 Energy would manage the energy marketplace using blockchain that assists them to communicate with other Marubeni’s power production facilities which include renewable, offices and factories across Japan thereby helping them to conduct a test ‘simulated’ energy transactions planning to form a full-scale commercially operational network in the future.

LO3 Energy CEO, Lawrence Orsini, stated during the press release: “This is a significant moment for LO3 Energy as it further expands our global net, giving us presence in Asia alongside our other projects in Australasia, Europe and the USA. The Japanese energy sector is in the midst of a drastic transition, and there are increasing numbers of private power producers and suppliers interested in developing new customer offerings particularly in the renewable energy space. Initially, this project is internally focused, but it is very much driven by the desire from Marubeni to explore the opportunities that blockchain management systems can offer in the transaction of energy throughout Japan.”

The chief operating officer of Marubeni’s power business division, Yoshiaki Yokota, added his opinion about the collaboration and stated that, “The way we produce and consume energy in Japan is changing radically, and we want to be at the forefront of that change, which is why we are partnering with LO3 Energy for this project. Their successful use of blockchain in the Brooklyn Microgrid and other projects around the world has shown us the potential for providing consumers with more energy choices and, crucially, improving efficiencies in energy usage. This project will allow us to privately evaluate how this kind of network could work here in Japan and develop case examples that we can use to decide how and when this kind of project could be implemented widely,”

In its process of testing blockchain-based solutions for the transactional side of energy deployment, Marubeni joins the list of various other leading industry players.

Further, Fujitsu declared that it had completed the procedure of its own trial related to a blockchain energy sharing project in combination with Japanese utility supplier, Eneres, during the end of the previous month.