Elia Group and Energy Web Launch Multi-Year Strategic Partnership
Brussels, Belgium and Zug, Switzerland — 16 September 2020 — Today Elia Group and Energy Web (EW) jointly announced a multi-year strategic partnership that will focus on testing and validating the technological promises of enterprise-grade, blockchain-based solutions for supporting the energy markets Elia Group serves. The Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS) — an open-source stack of decentralized digital technologies, including the Energy Web Chain — will form the technological backbone for the partnership.
Elia Group, through its subsidiaries Elia (Belgium) and 50Hertz (Germany), is responsible for managing and operating the transmission grid infrastructure, ensuring a reliable electricity supply for over 30 million customers.
EW and Elia Group will work together on multiple fronts:
- Understanding the potential of decentralized identifiers (DIDs) for a more-decentralized electricity system. DIDs help to overcome the challenges of market and software silos for integrating the electricity and mobility sectors. DIDs similarly help streamline asset registry management for distributed energy resources (DERs), which will make up a bigger and bigger portion of Europe’s power grid.
- Improving the tracking of green energy and services. In 2019, European renewable energy demand surpassed 500 terawatt-hours (TWh), totalling more than half a billion guarantees of origin (GO). Logging the creation, ownership, and retirement of GOs with distributed ledger technology (DLT) will become more important as consumers seek green energy. This means applying the principle in near-real time to guarantee an effective match between green production and consumption. This principle could also apply not only to energy but also to services delivered by the TSO which could therefore also benefit from the green tracking.
- Providing technical expertise and support for Elia Group’s new DLT Lab. As a founding member of Energy Web, Elia Group’s innovation arm has been on the forefront of exploring blockchain’s potential in the energy sector, from conducting a 2018 proof-of-concept on the Energy Web Chain test network to hosting an EW Chain validator node since the chain’s launch in June 2019. Now EW will support Elia Group’s new DLT Lab, which further advances the company’s domain expertise and internal capabilities.
“A consumer-centric system is a desired outcome of the energy transition,” said Kai Schmied, Elia Group Innovation Manager. “It is our societal duty to work with all market parties in order to operate the system with lowest costs and to put in place the building blocks that will bring the benefits of the energy transition to the consumer. The development of capabilities in DLT or other digital technologies will allow all participants to manage the complexities of decentralized flexibility while delivering more value and comfort for consumers.”
“We believe that public digital infrastructure is as integral as physical infrastructure when it comes to the future of power grids around the world,” added Jesse Morris, CCO of Energy Web. “We are proud to partner with such a progressive, forward-looking system operator as Elia Group and we look forward to working with them over the coming years to not only develop new solutions, but grow a consortium of market participants around the open technology stack.”
The Elia Group and EW teams are currently designing the first project, which will focus on leveraging electric vehicles and charging stations in operating reserves and frequency response markets. They are scheduled to unveil the results in 2021.
About Elia Group
Elia Group is an electricity transmission system operator (TSO) ensuring that production and consumption are balanced around the clock, supplying 30 million end users with electricity. With subsidiaries in Belgium (Elia) and northeast Germany (50Hertz), Elia Group develops, maintains, and operates 19,271 km of high-voltage network and is one of Europe’s top five TSOs. With a reliability level of 99.99%, we give society a robust power grid, which is important for socio-economic prosperity.
We also aspire to be a catalyst for a successful energy transition towards a reliable, sustainable, and affordable energy system. By expanding international high-voltage connections and integrating ever-increasing amounts of renewable energy production, Elia Group promotes both the integration of the European energy market and the decarbonization of our society. The Elia Group is also innovating its operational systems and developing market products so that new technologies and market parties can access our grid, thus making the energy transition happen.
For more information, visit https://innovation.eliagroup.eu/
About Energy Web
Energy Web is a global, member-driven nonprofit accelerating a low-carbon, customer-centric electricity system by unleashing the potential of blockchain and decentralized technologies. EW focuses on our open-source, decentralized, digital technology stack — the Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS) — to enable any device, owned by any customer, to participate in any energy market.
In mid-2019, EW launched the Energy Web Chain, the world’s first enterprise-grade, public, open-source blockchain platform tailored to the sector’s regulatory, operational, and market needs. The EW Chain anchors a broader technology stack known as the Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS), a blockchain-plus suite of middleware, toolkits, and other digital solutions to support the energy transition.
EW also fostered the world’s largest energy blockchain ecosystem, comprising utilities, grid operators, renewable energy developers, corporate energy buyers, IoT / telecom leaders, and others. More than two-dozen of those companies host validator nodes for the EW Chain. Energy Web has become the industry’s leading energy blockchain partner and most-respected voice of authority on energy blockchain.
For more, please visit https://energyweb.org.
CONTACTS
Peter Bronski, Energy Web
+1.201.575.5545 | peter.bronski@energyweb.org
