Rethink Trust 2018: Ana Trbovich, Open source blockchain for the energy industry
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Ana Trbovich, Open source blockchain for the energy industry
I'd like to thank Alexei and rethink trusts for inviting us to talk here today I'd like to start by emphasizing that we are a public open source energy industry blockchain not a private blockchain as many have pointed out to the different features of blockchain and why they create value in different areas of activity I'd like to emphasize that in energy there are specific challenges that blockchain can solve ranging from the security that it provides to authentic secure metering and aggregating especially at the great edge renewable energy especially resources in a less expensive way than it can be done otherwise so what we are doing as a foundation a non-profit foundation registered in Switzerland is that we are providing the core tech the platform on top of the platform there are energy corporates and startups building applications and we are also working with major projects on scaling solutions and interoperability so we started with the etherium stack we chose what we found to be the most performant client at the time probably still is which is the parity client and we are now talking to Pokhara we're one of the industries that is part of their piloting and Radin for scaling solution so what rating essentially does is takes us off chain those transactions that do not need to be all on the chain and then aggregates them and authenticates on the chain so what were our challenges just like everyone else found blockchain to be extremely interesting with high potential but also in early development stage with a number of unknowns with errors included as one innovates many of which are well known in the blockchain community we also found the adoption to be very slow especially in conservative industries such as the energy industry but we also found yearning for knowledge and fostering innovation in internal communities among a range of corporates globally as we are a regulated industry we also need regulators to come on board many have not still heard of blockchain or are just about learning now some are more advanced so as you sell from a slide earlier this morning we even have a regulator in Chile which has created their own blockchain based application to authenticate energy data in Chile and many utilities are still developing use cases and some are more advanced than others and by the way there is no global traditional global divide here there are leading utilities and startups around the world but there is a cluster in Europe especially of energy blockchain startups which is interesting from a tech development point of view so this is our roadmap map which is probably most interesting to people coming to this conference so we started from the original software stack we went immediately to proof of authority system our test net has been up and running since November it's called toe biloba you may know traditionally that developers like to name test nets based the names of different underground stations this one happens to be in Chile and is largely ran on renewable energy so we thought it was an appropriate name for our test we you can already observe the test net anyone building applications can use our test nuts so although we are energy focused we are open and at the moment any application could be tested on our test net for free you can go on our website which is energy web door org get some tokens from a faucet and start testing so from there we focused on a range of features including light client development to have a more secure light client so as to be able to connect a range of devices in the energy sector not just a large Scudder in a power plant but also a solar panel and smaller devices in energy we also support a development of permissioning features of wisdom and we did this incorporation mainly with parity technologies and what is important is that as we are a nonprofit and open source focused everything that we have financially supported as a foundation is available to everyone else open source it is as the gentleman from IBM said GPL but its GPL version 3 there is no copy left anyone can use it and I'll go now to I can quickly say what the plan is and that's the purple part of the of the ladder so d3 a I'll present very briefly is a simulation environment we're building as another layer in our chain bridges in radan I already talked about in polka dot not only scaling but also interoperability solutions we imagine in the future although we are a public chain that there may be private chains for specific jurisdictions that are regulated in a specific way and these chains will then need to communicate with the main chain so there were a number of surveys so various startups in energy blockchain and we did one ourselves this is 41 startups that presented at event horizon this past April in Berlin as noted by Alexey it's the largest energy blog change summit we do one every year so that was the second one next year we will do one for the launch of our network our full launch and most of them look at the more disruptive applications like peer-to-peer trading but there is also some basically process transaction simplification application as well back-office applications that are applicable applicable to any sector so and just to go back to the tack most of them use aetherium or aetherium based chains I think only one uses Harper Ledger's so we are tech agnostic as a platform but at the moment the community that we're working with is very focused on etherium so what are the some of the apps and I wanted to present these to show you what is happening in the ecosystem so we're providing the platform which is free open source public developing features that help these applications get to the market more quickly and more effectively and these are the startups that are working with us and that are part of our ecosystem so some of the examples electron started in UK and helps customers switch from one utility to another and is also looking at grid flexibility issues and other issues it's working with larger utilities like Centrica and others utility billing is a very important case of process simplification and reducing costs in energy business evie charging so share in charge you may have heard of they are also present here in the Netherlands they are mostly present in the UK and Germany energy is a big utility that invested in them and they're looking at shared EB charging but in the future what we can imagine as we are rethinking trust is that if you have your Tesla or another electric vehicle that you can use it also for as an energy source not just for your home but also to sell excess energy to your neighbor or someone Krita a microgrid there are also startups in the flexibility what we call demand response area like flexi Dow and then there are other areas those are just some that I wanted to present one area where we as a native web foundation decided to also devote resources in addition to the core tech is an application that really demonstrates the value of the blockchain technology that is immediate so I don't expect you to understand how renewable energy certificates are being issued I just want you to compare this picture to this picture to understand why blockchain makes it easier and it's just a simpler process and when you take out all the intermediaries you also take out a lot of the cost so in renewable energy certificates these intermediaries can take up forty to sixty percent of the price of the UH transaction in issuing and selling renewable energy certificates right now it's so complicated that you don't have many players either issuing or buying certificates but when you get to this and when you have a simple interface than things change we can really enlarge the market so what we did right now as we have a just an alpha version of this application we have connected devices we have created provenance issued certificates and we have trading happening to apply it pilots so you can see some of them in the upper left corner and those are real assets this is actually happening in reality so we have Microsoft buying certificates from Angie large French utility in three countries of operation we have Eon which is a large German utility buying from a smaller German utility we have a bank buying from Singapore Power Group in Singapore and the last one in the bottom right corner is our company you can see part of our office space we're buying from two developers who have connected their solar panels and are issuing renewable energy certificates so this is happening this is real this is not this in future so the next step for us is to build the interface and to allow this to you know for anyone to use it very easily we're also talking to national registries because although this is not a highly regulated business of issuing renewable energy certificates the way the registries register them needs to change to allow blockchain based applications so we're talking to them and hope to have again a real-life country registry implementing this solution sometime in the next few months and the platform that I mentioned is probably going to be the most disruptive in energy at the moment it's just a simulation environment where you can you can basically you are going from bottom up we're connecting devices we're having them determine how much they want to consume one and from what from what from where the energy will originate based on preferences and so at the moment we did an alpha and what we have already done is to demonstrate how you can determine preferences to to enable micro grid to be formed and to continue by selecting what is it more important in your home so in the future for example imagine there isn't enough power in a certain area you can still set up your preferences so that so that the fridge remains to be in working condition in most homes so this is where it's going where a market making agent comes from the device from a home rather than from a utility or the grid dictating how the market will work and the pricing also will be negotiated by our devices which is a very interesting way to look at an energy market future how can you get involved one if you are developing apps you can already use our plot form to testa and so as I mentioned we're in a test phase for at least close to another year the TAC is ready we just want to develop further scaling solutions and we want to integrate our governance mechanism in the TAC so as we are proof of authority and an energy industry network we need to think about antitrust we need to think about data protection making sure that the market is competitive and so our validators are the guardians of the system and protocol upgrades based on our governance mechanism will be voted on by those that are running apps in the system so in our governance design framework app operators will have the power to influence how the network further develops if you are an energy start-up or utility or an Energy actor you can also join as an affiliate and become part of our ecosystem and I'll be happy to talk to you more in person about that we will have a public token generation event sometime next year right now it's still by invitation very private because we really care who the stakeholders are so to us it matters that those that are part of our ecosystem are involved invested energy activists and those that care about a cleaner energy sector and finally if you want to come work for us we're always hiring so that's an email that you can use and this is my email since there is no time for Q&A and if you don't manage to catch me at the conference please feel free to email me thank you if we can do probably one or two questions so perfect any volunteers yes since you're doing proof authority why didn't you just pick hyper lecture why did he do it areum and then do the whole thing yourself so like I said we are tech agnostic we did not choose aetherium because we had a political preference towards it it was based on a technological assessment that the parity client at the time was most performant technically and also since our ecosystem is very important to us the community at the moment feels much more strongly about it the Aryan based solutions and if you know from going back to the startups that I have mentioned that survey was completely objective we didn't pick them based on the fact that they use but it is a dominant tech in our space having said that were open to consider other solutions in the future and I just I had a conversation with representatives from hyper ledger so if they provide solutions that we think are technologically a good fit for us we are completely open to that one more question okay thanks okay thank you [Applause]