WePower in partnership with Elering is launching a pilot project to tokenize Estonian energy nationwide
By: Aukse Sia
Tags: Partnerships, Blockchain, Updates, Token, Energy

Today marks a pivotal day for WePower.

A few months ago we signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Estonian national transmission service operator Elering agreeing to explore possible cooperation opportunities and exchange technological knowledge.

Today we are extremely excited to announce that our cooperation with Elering is moving forward — we are starting to work on our blockchain-based energy trading solution integration with Elerings Estfeed data platform. This allows us to tokenize real energy using Estonian hourly energy production/consumption data and test high volume energy tokenization and trading on the WePower platform.

Handshake for the future of partnership: Taavi Veskimägi, Chairman of the Board / CEO of Elering & Nick Martyniuk, Co-founder/ CEO of WePower

We believe that this project might be one of the turning points in proving blockchain’s applicability in one of the most fundamental industries to our daily lives — energy.

Let us share a few important reasons why:

1. Meaningful integration with energy infrastructure can serve as a very important proof point for blockchain technology and thus broaden public’s perception of its value.

During our pilot with Elering we will integrate our blockchain-based trading platform with Elering’s Estfeed data exchange platform and in turn tokenize an already functioning energy supply ecosystem. Although the current platform and its core features can run on the Ethereum blockchain, to achieve the full vision of the WePower platform more scalability will be required. We will test a number of different blockchains including but not exclusive to Ethereum Casper, EOS and NEM to find the best fitting one for large scale infrastructure projects. Our learnings will be helpful to other developers as well as showcase a much broader range of blockchain use cases outside the widely-known payment and trading applications.

2. Nationwide energy data tokenization demonstrates that blockchain can be of a national relevance.

Elering is a national transmissions systems operator whose work impacts every habitant of Estonia. Over the last few years Elering, along with the other national energy organizations, have done a tremendous job digitizing country’s energy infrastructure. Estonia now has a 100% smart meter coverage with its own dedicated data hub, called Estfeed. This infrastructure provides ideal conditions for our tokenization test. It will serve as another strong case for governments across the globe on how innovation can help improve infrastructure and systems used by citizens across their nations.

3. Elering is one of the most innovative utility companies in Europe as well a respected thought leader. Together with Elering we will have an opportunity bring awareness of the value of energy tokenization to the energy industry at large.

Energy is a strategically important sector to any country and territory. This is why successful innovation in this sector needs to be driven alongside experienced partners that would help us open new opportunities, connections and tackle large system integration challenges along the way. Elering has been at the forefront of energy infrastructure innovation in Europe. Its learnings have been share and adopted by energy utilities across the continent and beyond. Our project with Elering will be the first of its kind in Europe and will serve as a practical case study that other countries and utilities can learn from and enroll in their energy systems.

When we started WePower we were all very excited about the opportunities that blockchain technology can bring to the energy sector. It looked as a far and ambitious goal that we were all uncomfortably excited to tackle. With the start of this pilot test, this goal is turning into a reality. There is still a long way ahead but we have never been more sure that all of us together with our supporters and community can make the green energy revolution happen.

The following is an outline for the various steps/activities and phases for the Estonia Pilot, WePower and Elering partnership:

High level services development objectives:

Future energy generation auction trading Retail sales logic energy purchasing Grid flexibility services development

Phase 1: Technology proof of feasibility at scale.

Integrate WePower’s existing Ethereum based platform with the Elering Estfeed data exchange platform

Gain/build access to the test environment data to optimize the energy token model for scaling constraints of different blockchain technologies

The proof of concept will use the following estimation:

1. On the current Ethereum powered platform running a simulation of 1 years’ worth data would generate 10 million energy tokens. This assumes a 30TWh volume of energy with 1 million market participants;

2. Although running the simulation will take days, based on normal daily transaction volumes and estimated producers that will be connected via the first version of the WePower platform (when launched), can be running in real-time. Different cutting edge blockchain technologies will be benchmarked against the performance results of the Ethereum build.

Phase 2: Testing services and technology interaction on live data streams.