For a long time electricity has been distributed like this
It’s 2019. The world is changing, and people are rethinking how we arrange ourselves. All over the world countries are shifting to electricity grids that look more like this.
Singapore began liberalising their electricity market in 2001.
The SP group is the new corporatised entity which supplanted the former Electricity and Gas department of the Public Utilities Board.
In a completely liberalised energy market, privately owned power plants and renewable energy generators can plug in and start generating electricity for the grid.
In Texas and Chile, for example, it’s reported that liberalisation has improved price response and lowered costs for consumers. Monopolies drive up prices, and our demand is greater than ever.
Peer to Peer electricity is exciting because it allows for greater contribution from smaller players. The electricity monopoly exists because historically a group has owned the entire distribution system. More often than not this group is a government who also have the luxury of making competition illegal or expensive.
Once the regulation is stripped away, contracts can be written for all kinds of agreements. Want to sell electricity you generated on your roof in your neighbourhood? go right ahead. Why not bundle your generation with other small-scale generators and provide a product? If energy is tokenized it can be traded. If energy is tokenized and accountable, all the better.
Electrify is a company in Singapore
Electrify was an early mover who took advantage of Singapore’s deregulating energy markets. In short, they made a lot of money very quickly. This was all tried and tested Singaporean Dollars, completely independent of cryptocurrency.
Electrify “The Company” has facilitated over $3.8 million worth of transactions since March last year. This feat earned CEO Julius Tan, a spot in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia.
What Does Electrify Do?
Electrify built a platform that looks at an electricity user’s consumption profile and generates a payment plan with a pricing engine they named Fibonacci. The consumer is given a quote and they are free to choose a plan from one of several retailers in an open marketplace.
Along Came Ethereum Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are better than natural language contracts. You can break an agreement down to its raw input/output conditions and it will execute only when the agreed upon conditions are met.
This contract is code. Because it’s code you can do things like click a button to deploy it.
There are two problems that Electrify plans to solve with smart contracts
- It is too expensive to just have a contract written up that you can take to an energy provider. Individuals can’t enter into a trust-less arrangement with someone who sells electricity.
Brokers and retailers use complex CFD contracts to buy from wholesalers. Then they onsell through pricey CRM/ERP software to consumers. This is best case scenario. Clectricity contracts between retailers and consumers are often executed manually. This results in high a costs of operations and monitoring for both big and small electricity retailers.
Smart contracts cost only gas to deploy, and they are settled instantly and with the immutability of Ethereum.
Electrify Marketplace 2.0
“The Electrify ecosystem will operate as the consumer-facing, Electrify Marketplace 2.0”- The Whitepaper
Marketplace 2.0 will server as the main consumer interface (web + mobile). It is what individuals, or households, will use to buy energy from one of the competing retailers on the Electrify platform.
“Synergy, is a peer to peer trading platform.”
Synergy is a contracting tool kit that aims to prioritise the user’s experience. Simple and inexpensive enough that anyone can enter into an agreement to trade energy with anyone else.
“Synergy allows consumers to buy power directly from small-scale producers, such as residential rooftop solar and wind turbines. Synergy removes the middleman, and reduces energy costs for all consumers. P2P trades will ride on a Contract for Difference (CfD) settlement mechanism. Beyond microgrids, the CfD-based platform will allow Synergy to plug-and-play into major cities and all developed power grids globally”
Take a step back, for a second, and realise that what Electrify.Asia has done is turn power into a trade-able digital asset. Everyday Singaporean's might one day be able to trade electrify tokens for Food Panda credits or a trip with local Ride sharing app Grab.
PowerLedger, WePower and Grid+…How Does Electrify.Asia Stack Up?
The fact that there is a PowerLedger ,WePower and Grid+ is a testament to blockchain’s disruptive potential in worldwide energy markets.
I think Electrify.Asia biggest leg up on its competition is how established Electrify is in Singapore’s energy market.
They have moved 3.8 million dollars of electricity, more than any other energy cryptocurrency, as a company. It was off chain, but partnerships matter and Julius Tan and Martin Lim have experience in this space.
Julius Tan was a manager and business development executive at Sunseap. An electricity company in Singapore specializing in renewable energy generation. He is involved with the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore, and the Singapore Economic Development Board.
The founder and CEO of OmiseGo, Jun Hasegawa is also on the Electrify.Asia advisory board.
Jeffrey Char
Another noteworthy adviser, Jeffery Char, is top dog at TEPCO’s blockchain efforts.
TEPCO?
The recent Jeffrey Char, announcements and the TEPCO rumours surrounding them aren’t something you should overlook.
(Update MOU was later announced. Token pumped 50% then came all the way back down)
TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) serves Japan’s Kanto region, Yamanashi Prefecture, and the eastern portion of Shizuoka Prefecture.
Greater Tokyo is an area with the population of Greater New York + Greater L.A. in a tenth of the space. Lots of electricity.
Electrify.Asia might never sell a kWh in Japan. It doesn’t matter, from an investor’s point of view. Any movement towards this goal will excite the hype and in a somewhat bullish market will get the price on the right side of $1.
I am buying it all the way down to the bottom, because when the hype builds, and we do another January, Electrify.Asia will moon #lambo.
Resources
Interviews
- Electrify Asia: Julius Tan & Martin Lim light up the Blockchain with BCB
- ELECTRIFY.ASIA Taking on Australia
PowerPod
To track the energy that small scale energy producer are generating, Electrify.Asia have developed an IoTs smart device to measure and enable P2P trades via Synergy smart contracts.
PowerPod will log the energy produced onto a blockchain. Producers will be required to deposit at least 200 ELEC/kW of rated generation capability as permissioned access to write energy data onto the blockchain. This encourages long term ownership and disincentives dishonest behaviour. This data will also allow producers to be awarded with a renewable energy certificate.
OmiseGo Wallet, Plasma and Scalability
Electrify.Asia are working with OmiseGo to explore the scalability solutions that are being developed for Ethereum.
look at this from the Telegraph group
In early January BlockchainBrad interviewed Julius Tan and Martin Lim. This is transcribed from that interview.
One reason why working with Omisego is so important for us is that working with Omisego public network we’re working with them to actually be able to explore the scalability solution they’re developing for ethereum. That’s actually very very important, we put out a press release for this as well. You’ve heard of plasma, what’s being developed for plasma, right? So OMG has been contributing heavily into that kind of research and we’re writing and working with them to be able to execute our own blockchain applying that kind of research and the findings of that research and the preliminary results so far that we’ve seen from Omisego has been wow… pretty incredible… really incredible. So lets just put it this way. We can’t steal any thunder away from their announcements in the next few months. I dare say this. I think everyone are going to be seriously surprised at what OMG is going to be capable of… we were gobsmacked… seriously gobsmacked.
Disclaimer: The following is the culmination of my own research. I hope it will spread awareness for this deserving project and get me likes on the internet. This is not investing advice :).
