What to Expect from Energy Web in 2020

The final quarter of 2019 was a busy one for Energy Web Foundation (EWF). We’re kicking off the new year with a recap of some recent EWF milestones and a teaser for what’s to come in 2020.

December saw a flurry of significant milestones and announcements for EWF:

We released our new technology roadmap and vision for the Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS), an open-source stack of software and standards including the Energy Web Chain informed by three years of experimentation with the global energy blockchain community.

• EW-DOS focuses on creating value via the two use cases that have the biggest impact on EWF’s mission to support large scale decarbonization of the energy sector: enhancing sector traceability and unlocking grid flexibility from customer-owned resources.
• EW-DOS meets the global requirements for establishing identity, enforcing rules, and facilitating transactions between billions of electricity assets, customers, and market participants. It leverages decentralized identifiers, a series of decentralized registries, messaging services, and integration with legacy information technology systems. Read the full paper to learn more, and stay tuned for further technical documentation and case studies in the coming weeks.

The EW Chain Validator community grew from 10 to 28! EWF Members Shell and Stedin became the latest major energy market participants to join the Validator set, which now represents 15 countries spanning 18 time zones. In addition to securely operating the publicly accessible Energy Web Chain, the Validators play an important role in governing its evolution; they recently approved a proposal to implement the Ethereum Istanbul Hard Fork (which will improve network security and performance) in Q1 this year.

Our ecosystem continued to grow, with the addition of several major market participants as Energy Web Members:

• Global wind industry leader Vestas;
• Latin America’s largest electricity company, Eletrobras;
• Austrian utility and blockchain innovator Wien Energie;
• IoT interface provider RIDDLE&CODE

We launched a members-only portal showcasing the first two case studies in our new series of profiles on leading energy blockchain projects from around the globe: PTT’s I-REC Marketplace and Elia’s Flexibility Settlement Project. This series will detail business and technical aspects of pioneering Energy Web member projects, as well as key findings. Watch for additional profiles in early 2020.

We expect 2020 to be the most significant one to date for enterprise adoption of decentralized technologies in the energy sector. Here’s an initial scope of what you can expect from EWF and the ecosystem this year.

EWF Member APG is expected to deploy a first-of-its-kind flexibility project using the Energy Web Chain and a new open-source toolkit, Energy Web Flexhub. APG is paving the road for the integration of DERs into wholesale electricity markets, enabling DER owners to play an active role in balancing the grid.

EWF Member PTT will launch the production version of their renewable energy marketplace platform built on the Energy Web Chain and using Energy Web Origin. PTT is making it possible for any company, person, or device like an electric vehicle to directly find, buy, track, and report certified renewable energy to increase demand for new projects in Southeast Asia, starting in Thailand. This renewable energy buyer-focused platform, which launches in June 2020 and promotes The I-REC Standard, will make it easier for any buyer to:

• Indicate their requirements — however broad or narrow they are — and find projects that suit these needs;
• Support the development of new, additional renewable energy projects; and
• Make more credible, compelling, and granular claims associated with the specific projects that they helped add to the grid and cover their electricity consumption.

Multiple additional open-source software modules are also under development by EWF for 2020 release including but not limited to:

• Energy Web Flexhub — allowing grid operators including DSOs, TSOs, and vertically-integrated-utilities to seamlessly integrate DERs into their infrastructure
• Energy Web Identity Directory — giving every device an identity and making it trustworthy
• Application Registry Reference Architecture — a permissioning system for identities in the identity directory, making it possible for grid operators to include / exclude identities from participating in different applications
• Oracle Services — a standardized framework for bringing off-chain data on-chain in a trustless manner (see a recent post here for an example of this approach via Chainlink)
• Decentralized Messaging — allowing any device to communicate seamlessly and securely with applications built on EW-DOS
• Decentralized Datastore — a more efficient way than blockchain to store data in a decentralized manner, specifically for when data integrity and correctness are important but time stamps and versioning are not.

We also expect to launch Energy Web Academy — a new service to help energy market participants learn how to work with decentralized digital technologies. Energy Web Academy will include a series of instructional videos, articles, and trainings beginning with the fundamentals of using Energy Web Chain technology, and building towards more technical subjects (e.g., developing smart contract front/back-ends, securely integrating DER, utilizing decentralized identities in apps, etc.). Energy Web Academy may also feature mini-series on non-technical, business, tokenomic, and regulatory topics as well.

Our team is also preparing for “EW Chain 2.0”: EWF will work with the community of validators to experiment with emerging technologies and consensus protocols to support the evolution of the Energy Web Chain. Here, we also envision research activities to enable scaling of EWC including:

• Zero Knowledge Protocols for scalability
• Various approaches to layer one scalability, via either an EWF beacon chain (ETH 2.0), Polkadot and/or Cosmos architectures
• Layer two scaling via state channels

We look forward to bringing enterprise-grade decentralized digital solutions to market in partnership with the EWF community throughout the year.