So... energy performance contracting with the word "blockchain" glued on the end.
This is not the first time people have proposed this, someone even pitched this to our research group not long ago.
The basic idea of broadening the investment base for EPC is like any kind of crowdsourced investment to cut out the middleman of institutional investors (instead of giving my money to a bank to invest in EPC, I do it myself). With the same downside that individuals are usually much worse judges of projects than institutions, so what you gain in reduced costs you lose in high risk.
Then comes the blockchain bit, which suffers exactly the same problem of every project I've seen like this which is there is no technological way to tie the tokens to the energy use. Saving energy cannot 'generate' tokens, therefore you have to come up with a contract that ties the energy savings value to the value of the tokens. In which case there is basically no difference to just using cash since all the 'security' of the arrangement comes from contractual obligations, which are easier to create and more reliable to enforce using regular currency.
Same for blockchain-based recycling tracking (which Chinese government had been investing in a couple years ago), etc.
My issue with all of those ideas is that they are essentially trying (even if failing, for now) to devise ways for humans to trust fellow humans with less.
Contrast the experience of using the railway in South Korea (typically you never have to show your ticket) and China (where staff went through my luggage and confiscated shaving gel of all things): setting aside any legitimate justifications for either treatment, one makes you feel like a fugitive who should not be trusted most of the time while the other treats you like a responsible and honest adult—and we all know how labeling works.
Will it be impossible to address, in a post-scarcity society, the underlying issues that cause humans to lie to or hurt each other? Do we actually have to resort to dressing more and more of inter-human interaction into a straightjacket of never-forgetting blockchain?
This is not the first time people have proposed this, someone even pitched this to our research group not long ago.
The basic idea of broadening the investment base for EPC is like any kind of crowdsourced investment to cut out the middleman of institutional investors (instead of giving my money to a bank to invest in EPC, I do it myself). With the same downside that individuals are usually much worse judges of projects than institutions, so what you gain in reduced costs you lose in high risk.
Then comes the blockchain bit, which suffers exactly the same problem of every project I've seen like this which is there is no technological way to tie the tokens to the energy use. Saving energy cannot 'generate' tokens, therefore you have to come up with a contract that ties the energy savings value to the value of the tokens. In which case there is basically no difference to just using cash since all the 'security' of the arrangement comes from contractual obligations, which are easier to create and more reliable to enforce using regular currency.