initiatives in a decentralised and encrypted/secure
manner provides an avenue for well-documented
and traceable CO 2 emissions certificate generation
in line with the methodologies prescribed by the
United Nations Framework for Climate Change
Convention (UNFCCC). Such climate change
mitigation actions are critical to the sustainable
development of the world and are in line with the
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
The Malaysian-based blockchain start-up, EPC
Blockchain Sdn Bhd is developing a decentralised
platform to track energy savings and tokenise
carbon credits. The platform is called BESC, short
for Blockchain Energy Savings Consortium. They
are planning to deploy two blockchains, one public
and the other private, using NEM blockchain
platform. It’s one of the few enterprise solutions
that can be applied to utilise the decentralisation
capabilities that blockchains offer, while providing
the necessary privacy and data security.
Private blockchains are usually used in
Business-to-Business (B2B) interactions. In the
case of BESC, they are used to record the energy
savings of a project. These savings are the product
of an Energy Performance Contract (EPC) between
the project developers and an energy service
company (ESCO). EPCs had previously been nearly
impossible to use in a virtual environment. But
now, with the use of digital tokens (Energy Savings/
ES coin) and smart contracts, respective parties
can now easily automate, track and validate
payments. Data can then undergo an auditing
procedure by carbon consultants to certify the
corresponding amount of carbon credits awarded
9