Chile’s Minister of Energy Susana Jiménez has announced on Thursday that the National Energy Commission (CNE) will start using blockchain technology in order to boost the levels of security, integrity, traceability and confidence of the public information available.

The CNE last month announced its plans to tap into the potential of blockchain technology. This initiative positions the Ministry of Energy and the CNE as the first Chilean public institutions to use blockchain technology.

The objective is to raise the standards that certify the quality and certainty of the data that is published to and from the country’s energy sector. According to the official release, this will be achieved through the information and statistics platform "Energía Abierta".

"[T]he Ministry of Energy…[is] interested in downloading this technology from a conceptual level to a specific case, understanding that it is considered by experts worldwide as the most disruptive technology of the last decade, and that [would] be part of our day to day within the next few years,” Minister Jiménez said.

The blockchain initiative will see the CNE hosting data on “open energy” platform – databases distributed in hundreds of thousands of servers, allowing everyone to have access to real-time energy information, with the information being authenticated by many witnesses observing the process. In the first stage of the project, the CNE will include information on national electric installed capacity, average market prices, marginal costs, hydrocarbon prices, compliance with the NCRE law, medium-generation electricity generation, the factors of emission and residential generation facilities, among others.

“By using this technology, we will raise the levels of trust of our stakeholders, investors and citizens in general who use the data delivered,” Jiménez added.

[Note: Some sections of the article have been translated from Spanish]