Energy Web Foundation Announces New Technology Roadmap Focused on ‘Decentralized Operating System’ to Accelerate the Energy Transition
Zug, Switzerland — 11 December 2019 — Today Energy Web Foundation (EWF) announced a major evolution of its technology roadmap. EWF has spent the past three years requirements gathering, experimenting, and prototyping solutions with the global energy blockchain community, which totals more than 100 member organizations and represents more than 280 million customers around the world. EWF is now focusing on leveraging blockchain and other digital technologies to accelerate the energy transition, especially in relation to two primary use cases: 1) enhancing energy sector traceability and 2) unlocking grid flexibility from customer-owned resources.
To support enterprise-grade solutions in these domains, EWF is transitioning its technology approach from a blockchain-only architecture to the Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS), a stack of open-source software and standards including the Energy Web Chain. EW-DOS leverages self-sovereign decentralized identifiers, a series of decentralized registries, messaging services, and integrations with legacy information technology (IT) systems to facilitate transactions between billions of assets, customers, grid operators, service providers, and retailers. This stack is a common digital, decentralized infrastructure that’s owned by none but managed and maintained by all.
“Customers are on track to invest more in the grid than utilities by 2030-including adding an estimated 3.5 billion internet-connected DERs to existing electric grids by 2030. But today’s power grids and electricity markets are not designed for a customer-centric future,” explained EWF chief commercial officer Jesse Morris. “Asset and customer information is fragmented across multiple siloed systems and is often invisible to grid operators. Consequently, assets remain largely isolated from core system planning and operation functions, and DERs in particular are chronically underutilized and frequently fail to capture their full potential value. We aim to overcome these issues with EW-DOS.”
EW-DOS works by completely inverting today’s system of top-down, unilateral management of energy-sector data acquisition and management. Instead, EW-DOS is a tool for establishing decentralized digital “passports” for every customer, asset, service provider, and authority in a given electricity system. Two initial deployments are already under way: 1) integrating small-scale customers into the wholesale balancing market in Austria with Austrian Power Grid AG and 2) bringing to life a first-of-its-kind renewables marketplace in Southeast Asia with PTT.
More information is available in EWF’s just-released white paper, EW-DOS: The Energy Web Decentralized Operating System: An Open-Source Technology Stack to Accelerate the Energy Transition .
About Energy Web Foundation
Energy Web Foundation (EWF) is a global, member-driven nonprofit accelerating a low-carbon, customer-centric electricity system by unleashing the potential of blockchain and decentralized technologies. EWF focuses on technology integration and development, co-creating standards and architectures, speeding adoption, and building community.
In mid-2019, EWF launched the Energy Web Chain, the world’s first enterprise-grade, open-source blockchain platform tailored to the sector’s regulatory, operational, and market needs. EWF also fostered the world’s largest energy blockchain ecosystem, comprising utilities, grid operators, renewable energy developers, corporate energy buyers, and others.
The Energy Web has become the industry’s leading energy blockchain partner and most-respected voice of authority on energy blockchain.
Peter Bronski, Energy Web Foundation
+1.201.575.5545 | peter.bronski@energyweb.org
Nicole Arnone, Inflection Point Agency for EWF
+1.770.856.7185 | nicolearnone@inflectionpointagency.com
Originally published at https://www.energyweb.org on December 11, 2019.
