Può la tecnologia regolare? Blockchain e «scambio tra pari» di energia rinnovabile

This paper aims to explore how emerging digital technologies, in the form of Blockchain, could affect market regulation, impacting the need of public intervention, with a special focus on the electricity market. In particular, peer to peer electricity trading through Blockchain will be analyzed to demonstrate that this technology does not necessarily embody a “Battle for Supremacy between the Code of Law and Code as Law” as supported by the prevailing literature. Indeed, smart contract could also represent an “entry point” for the regulator (e.g. by ensuring fairness and quick interventions in case of market distortion), thus becoming a new instrument of public and private granular and almost real-time control of energy transactions. Starting from this assumption, it will be argued that Blockchain could also represent a new form of coordination between market and public policy.