KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM ELECTRIFY’S LIVE AMA (30 Jan 2018)

Q: Is ELECTRIFY a tech company, a blockchain tech company, or something else altogether?

Martin: We’re an energy company looking to make the difference with blockchain. We’re not a bunch of blockchain developers looking for a solution and, going “Yeah, let’s go do an ICO, yeah!” We’ve always been very focused that we’re an energy company looking to make a big change in the ecosystem.

Q: Could you share more about Electrify’s affliation with OmiseGo and how you see this relationship developing in future?

Julius: We were introduced [to Jun Hasegawa] through a mutual friend a couple of months ago. We spent a lot of time talking and getting to know him and the rest of the OmiseGo team, their project, products and timeline of the product launch. [These interactions] helped to develop our relationship with them, and to better understand how our respective organisations and projects fit together.

Martin: Jun has been really generous in giving us access to what OmiseGo does and the account solutions that they are developing for Ethereum and the Ethereum foundation. What OmiseGo is doing is really quite incredible. We’re super grateful to be able to build our solution on top of what they are doing.

Q: Why did you decide to do an airdrop to the community? Which ‘community’ are you referring to?

Martin: We want to be as inclusive and fair to everyone participating in our project. This was our thinking when we started our project, which is why we didn’t give bounties or bonuses to investors, and the reason why we eventually decided to do an airdrop. The airdrop is to allow and incentivize more people to hold and use our token, as part of our community building spirit. OmiseGo did the same thing for their community, and we adopted the same model.

We will airdrop tokens to 3 different groups: our ELECTRIFY tribe, the OMG community and to Ethereum.

Q: What are the challenges you foresee when trying to enter other markets, and how might this affect platform usage?

Martin: When we first started the business, there were a multitude of challenges we had deal with. Everybody said the regulation wouldn’t allow [the marketplace] to happen, and so on and so forth. But most of these, if not all of them, we have actually managed to overcome. So we expect the same kind of challenges with every single market. Electricity being a commodity is the same everywhere, but the regulations and the pricing, the model, the distribution, all these mechanisms are different across markets.

But our advantage is that we’ve always been able to pivot — we react and plan accordingly. Of course, when we enter new markets, we find allies. This is why when we talk about Japan, it’s actually a very big deal for us that we get some serious muscle from a party on the ground, who’s able to help us open some doors. In addition, we will work with the regulators in each country to develop models that will be applicable in country.

Q: Yes, but it’s also very likely that actually a large portion of the user base will actually be people who are not familiar with the way energy systems work. How would you support adoption among a non-technical community?

Julius: This would vary across countries. For example, in Singapore, most people living in Singapore are not so familiar with energy market liberalization, whereas in Japan or Europe the user knows that they have a choice — they can choose their power provider, no matter what price, or energy sources. So the approach we take for every market will be slightly different. In essence, I think we would have to localise in each market — we would need to understand the people, their mind-sets, what makes them switch.

Martin: Every market we get into has different levels of development, and levels of maturity. Its got to do with the amount of time the market’s been liberalised, and more importantly, the level of education. I don’t mean how educated the market is per se, but how well-informed users are about the liberalisation of electricity. This will be a very big thing in every market we go into. We’ll need to inform [people] and that’s something we’ve done pretty decently, in Singapore’s context.

Q: How do you compare yourselves to Power Ledger and WePower? Is there enough of your type of power sharing companies in this space?

Martin: (laughs) We get asked this a lot! I think the comparison is inevitable — we’re an energy company, and when you put energy and blockchain together, well, there really isn’t all that many on the blockchain right now. WePower and Power Ledger are great projects. When we were developing our ICO we actually to them as models, and really tried to understand what they were doing in the energy space. How were they making themselves relevant? How we were relevant and how we could differentiate ourselves?

Power Ledger is a great project. One thing we saw though, and we hope we’re not wrong, was that the whole peer-to-peer sharing system that was built very much on micro-grids. Having come from the energy sector ourselves, we looked at this and said, “Well, it’s great to be able to share energy among your buddies, or on a resort with 50 different people. But what if I lived in the city — what if I lived in Singapore or in Tokyo or Manila or Shanghai — how would I share power with people?” When we started looking around we realised there weren’t solutions like that.

So we started developing a different solution on a different scale. WePower, also a very interesting project, talks about renewable energy. But that’s where we differ. We are not saying renewables are bad — they’re great — but we think that the focus on renewables could sometimes be misleading because the bigger issue at hand isn’t just renewables. It’s about the use of energy across a national grid. We need to be aware and the problem is that most of us aren’t. We don’t think twice, three times, or even once. We turn on a light, flip it on, where’s it coming from, who am I buying it from, can I get it cheaper, can I get it better, can I buy local? We don’t think about these things, and we have to get this conversation going. Once you start thinking about them, then the next step is, should renewables come into play? For all of these conversations to be had, you first have to have a choice and that is what Electrify gives you. It gives you choice, through the marketplace, through the peer to peer energy trading platform. You choose who you buy power from. That’s what we’re looking to build and how we’re different from the others.

Julius: I think the 3 different projects (WePower, Power Ledger, ELECTRIFY) have a slightly different focus. I think Power Ledger’s focus is a bit more on micro-grids. They also have pretty interesting initiatives on how people could come together and create a project. are more focused on solutions that work in developed cities.

One of the things we want to solve is how there are a lot of companies and consumers in developed cities that want to buy clean energy but don’t have access to a rooftop space or land to install wind turbines. But there’s a lot of space available in the suburbs, like Tuas or Sembawang (in Singapore). The problem is that people install solar panels, and in the daytime when on-site consumption is low, they export power into the grid with no revenue recovery because sometimes it’s too complicated or too expensive to recover revenue from smaller energy generation systems, let alone trade it. Plus, the thing about exporting power into the main city grid is that you get a volatile revenue per kilowatt hour. You are essentially a price taker and that’s not great for anyone who is trying to finance or develop a solar project. So, we are trying to match-make both the consumer and the producer so they both get more certainty in the pricing and energy consumption.

One quick point on renewables. I started my career as a solar researcher in a local university, and one thing we can’t ignore is that it is close to impossible to power an entire city solely on renewables today. This is because of the nature of [renewables], the variability, and the predictability of wind and solar power. It’s really close to impossible to do that now, unless you have a huge connected grid like the Europeans do. Even so, one country can claim that they are fully powered by renewables, but still have a backup power generator in another country. So, if anything happens [to their solar power], they still have a backup from another country, But some cities in Australia, Singapore, and Tokyo, don’t have that luxury. So, in short, we recognize that complimentary mix of energy sources is essential for grid stability, and I think that would be on trend for the next 5 to 10 years until battery prices become cheaper for distributed generation to really take off.

Q: What’s the feedback been from the retailers? What sorts of benefits are you bringing to them, from a business angle?

Martin: The first thing we did was to digitise all the physical contracts. It used to take days, if not weeks, to close a contract. We also created a pricing engine — the first of its kind — to help determine prices. This helped us a great deal when we presented to a Japanese power company. They had not seen this sort of pricing engine in Japan before, so we hope to be able to apply this to the Japanese market.

Another platform that we built was a quotation engine. Given that we work with a number of retailers, we thought that we, apart from the regulators, are the only guys that have visibility on nearly everybody’s contracts. So the selling points from that would be to build a database upon which we could generate quotations for the customer to choose from. So a customer could ask for 5 quotations, and we would send them a document with five anonymized quotations, and they get to pick and choose.

We’ve also made good headway with large volume consumers. We’re running a tender platform, which we’ve automated a great deal of. Retailers receive a tender notice from us, from the very large consumers that use our platform. We do everything from contact assessment, right down to low profiling, full customers and so on. By managing these processes, we help retailers go to market faster, more efficiently, and hopefully acquire customers a lot more fluidly than they would have if they did all this by themselves.

Q: Why do we need a token?

Julius: Tokens will be used to pay for transaction fees on the platform. Also, there is a possibility of having dishonest actors in a peer-to-peer model. We want energy providers, comprising producers and retailers, to deposit tokens that are proportional to how much power they intend to supply to customers. We hope that this disincentivises some of the dishonest behavior in tampering with the system, and keeps the community honest and transparent. The tokens will also be designed to encourage long-term ownership and platform usage.

Q: The White Paper mentioned that ELECTRIFY has a dual token (ELEC/TRON) system. Is this understanding still correct?

Julius: We initially designed a system with both an ELEC and TRON token, with the TRON token meant to be a base currency. We eventually removed it from the white paper because it was confusing for many people. A lot of people assumed that we would be doing an ICO or maybe doing two ICOs. Essentially, the TRON is digitised fiat currency. It’s not different from any of your e-wallets, where you can store your Sing dollars, your US dollars. We’ve emoved the name TRON, and have just replaced it with digitized fiat currency.

Q: Are you guys planning to speak at any other conferences or events?

Julius: We have a couple of events lined up in the next few months. Some in different parts of Malaysia, Vietnam, Germany, and Australasia. Stay tuned to our social media channels and we’ll announce more details over there!

The above transcript has been lightly edited for improved clarity and flow.