Bluenote — THE ENERGY EFFICIENCY PROTOCOL

6 min readFeb 11, 2019

Since the climate conference COP21 in Paris in 2015, an international group of like-minded entrepreneurs, experts and investors have worked together as the Bluenote Foundation to solve the biggest problem on earth, climate change, without being bound to the constraints ofinvestors or politicians. They focused on globally accessible CO2 emission limiting solutions, with a healthy financial return. Through the Bluenote Protocol, we can set the data free, allowing innovators to create new products, and even entirely new markets, based on analyzing a new universe of high-quality and high-frequency data from buildings around the world. With the Bluenote token as an incentive method, buildings can enter these new markets outside of their traditional annual budgeting cycle, creating a virtuous cycle of reinvestment in efficiency strategies.
The Bluenote Foundation has as its core mission to lead the transition to zero emission cities, but to do so in a way that is environmentally, economically and socially sustainable.
The Bluenote Protocol is designed to collect, process and analyze data in a decentralized manner. It is designed to share all value it creates through Bluenote tokens. There is no dividend, there are no shareholders, there are only bluenotes and all possible value that the ecosystem contains, will translate into the value of those bluenotes.
The real estate world is driven by traditional financial models, and technological advancements must conform to key industry drivers to for solutions to gain traction. Bluenote will accelerate the adoption of building energy technology upgrades by providing the transparency, trusted data and data analysis capabilities that support investment decisions in energy efficiency measures.

The Problem.
Getting the right data to make the best decisions about energy efficiency in buildings is difficult. A building’s energy use, operational and asset value data is rarely available. If it is, it is typically siloed in vendor hardware and software products, walled off from one another in expensive proprietary solutions. Without easy access to data, building owners and investors have had difficulty proving how specific investments in building technology impact energy use and the bottom line

The Solution.
Bluenote will pull these data streams out of buildings and standardize it through a distributed blockchain solution called the Bluenote Protocol. The Bluenote Protocol is an open-access, confidential network that enables simple data sharing, data services, and building analysis in order to unlock new energy efficiency strategies in buildings. The software-based Bluenote Protocol can be used both with new applications and with energy technologies already installed in buildings throughout the world.
The real estate world is driven by traditional financial models, and technological advancements must conform to key industry drivers to for solutions to gain traction. Bluenote will accelerate the adoption of building energy technology upgrades by providing the transparency, trusted data and data analysis capabilities that support investment decisions in energy efficiency measures
The long-term goal is to prove that the highest-performing energy buildings are also the most profitable form of real estate investment, leading to a shift in the market that drives emissions downward. A study done in collaboration between Deutsche Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation calculates that reducing just 30% of the electricity expenses borne by commercial buildings in the United States is worth $100 billion annually. The Bluenote Protocol will help unlock building asset value globally by creating the link between verified energy performance and financial returns.

Features

Buildings cause over 30% of the world’s carbon emissions, making them the largest singular source of carbon emissions because they consume about 60% of global electricity. More than 70% of all buildings were built before the first energy crisis in the 1970s, which creates an enormous market for improving their energy efficiency.
Bluenote is launching the world’s first blockchain-based energy efficiency protocol. It creates a decentralized ecosystem which allows building operators around the world to learn from one another how to waste less energy through distributed data intelligence.
Bluenote will establish a new foundation for long-term trustable quantification of energy efficiency impacts to enable policies and policy-directed markets to work. The opportunity to measure energy efficiency impacts at a granular level has begun to emerge in the building sector with digital metering and operations equipment. An increased understanding of and trust in energy efficiency performance would unlock the opportunity to have investments be funded not from cash flow/operations, but through third party financial instruments.

What can you do with real-time Measurement and Verification of efficiency?
● Enabling new markets: If you could create a trustworthy verification of efficiency, you could stimulate new transactions and create entirely new markets for the electric grid, such as new demand response, peak reduction, or grid balancing markets.
● Transparent Policy and Performance Measurement: Governments or utilities that invest in emissionreducing initiatives can enable the public to see, track, and analyze for themselves the efficacy of different civic strategies.
● A Protocol of Protocols: By leveraging the data validation and attribute verification modules on the Bluenote Protocol, other markets can create their own transactions on top of the Bluenote Protocol, now with trust in the impact they are transacting.

BLUENOTE’S DISTRIBUTED DATA INTELLIGENCE

+Fully decentralized data collection and secure access

The Bluenote Protocol allows for data owners to establish their own protected node, rather than having to share their data with a “platform” or “cloud.” Data owners create a distributed node to store their collected real-time or historical data, and connect it to the Bluenote protocol. Data is stored in standard data structures to allow for easy analysis. Importantly, data owners can allow for secure access for data analytics without ever exposing the raw data set.

+Distributed protocol

The Bluenote community will enable a global network of data analytics that can easily connect to data nodes. Analytics that can be provided by third parties include data collection, aggregation, objective recommendations for energy savings projects, validation of energy use and savings, and connecting energy savings to building valuation. Analytics must operate through the secure access provisions of the protocol, and don’t require data owners to send their full data set to third parties.

+Community data sharing has value

Data owners may wish to elect to share some of their data with the Bluenote community as a whole in an anonymized or protected format through the Bluenote Protocol. When data owners elect to share that data, they can receive tokens for the value that data brings to other building owners or analytics providers.

+Liquidity

The Bluenote Protocol facilitates a decentralized market for software and data access based on an ERC20 token. This allows for transactions between solution seekers and solution providers across the world with no intermediary. The token leverages distributed exchange infrastructure and solutions to serve protocol users or token traders wherever they are.

+Reward structure

A Reward Pool will be established to seed the Bluenote Protocol with quality building data and to facilitate data generation, uploads, and application deployment by 3rd parties, as a kickstart to the Bluenote token economy. Early on, participants can gain tokens if they collect data on nodes and share the data on those nodes with the broader Bluenote community. Early data sharers will earn token rewards based on the data type, quality, frequency, and uniqueness of the data.