WePower Engineering team’s blog #3: recap while on the way to platform’s public release
Time flies! For this blog, I decided to do a short recap on our progress building the WePower platform and what we are currently focusing on.
Some of the details won’t be new to those who have been following us closely, but as the technology side of the energy market, especially when merged with emerging technology as blockchain, might sound complicated, I believe it will be useful to go through our progress in a bit lighter steps, so we all will be on the same page.
Engineering progress’ recap
The WePower ICO token — WPR — has two functionalities: first, it provides proportional access to a priority auction to buy green energy that will run and be settled before the main auction — providing WPR token holders access to energy at the best price. And second — 0.9% of all energy sold in the auctions in the form of energy tokens will be contributed to the WPR donation pool. Where token holders will have proportional access.
Our main promise to our token holders is to launch auctions this year and then grow the auction volume and the corresponding amount of energy being pre-sold in the system.
To meet this goal — we are working on running our first auctions in Spain, in November this year, where we have a pipeline of 1000 MW of solar energy developments already lined up. With the public platform release in June, everyone will be invited to check these projects on our platform.
To make this happen, in a nutshell we need to following core feature blocks:
1. Energy development project module: It means that renewable energy developers can introduce their project and auction details on the platform. They can start to market their projects in preparation for the full platform launch in November.
2. Investor/consumer energy portfolio and analytics module: This module allows Investors/consumers pre-buy energy at a discount in the auctions and receive their energy in the form of energy smart contracts in their portfolio — where they can then look at their portfolio from different perspectives.
3. Smart Energy Contract trading module: Liquidity of the energy contracts is realized through the trading module. After the auction — the project development page will remain active and when the project starts producing energy then an IoT monitoring system will deliver performance statistics to the investors/buyers — and this data stream will remain active until the last smart energy contract has been cleared and energy delivered to its holder.
For all 3 above mentioned modules to function well, the user logic should be simple. But to make it this simple, the engineering underneath needs to be rather complex. Integrations with energy market participants as well as grid data aggregation layer are being built to enable smart energy contract holders to sell energy to the energy wholesale market and realize their value.
Where are we now on this?
We completed platform alpha version with core feature block end of April. Previews were shown to the community. Sessions with partners and advisors are ongoing to get feedback and refine. We are aiming for a June release to begin showing the upcoming auction pipeline and allowing energy investors/consumers to register their interest in buying green energy.
In addition to refining the core features for this first phase, lots of work is going into improving our techops capability, including monitoring and security. Getting this release out is our main focus at this point.
Further development of core features is continuing with a parallel engineering team starting customer trials with Energy Australia in June. Setting this team up this fast took some effort, some very talented people involved and I have high hopes that in the next 3 months they will be able to make significant progress and we will present newly developed functions.
Estonian energy tokenization pilot team is proceeding with additional people joining also in June. Smart Energy Contract data structure is being optimized. Working to prepare the energy dataset required to a full nationwide simulation, but do it in a way that will be compliant with privacy laws.
Required integrations with existing energy grid and market systems have been mapped in Spain and Australia. Detailed integration mapping will start soon.
WePower engineering is a beehive of activity in many different time zones at this point. And we are still accelerating: a lot of effort is going into growing the team to required levels to meet this challenge. Starting June we will have doubled our engineering capacity in 6 weeks. We need another 15–20 people before the first auctions in November.
We are looking for experienced design people, for engineers skilled in react and node.js for devops roles, system integrators and scrum masters. We prefer physical co-location either in our Tallinn or Vilnius office in this early stage of WePower, but for senior and high-skilled roles we also do remote work setups.
Key takeaways:
- Presently we are collecting feedback, testing the platform, showcased in April and refining the core features;
- Main focus point at the moment — improving our techops capability, including monitoring and security;
- Goal for June’s release — to begin showing the upcoming auction pipeline and allowing energy investors/consumers to register their interest to buy green energy;
- Required integrations with existing energy grid and market systems have been mapped in Spain and Australia;
- 15–20 team members experienced in design, engineering (skilled in react and node.js), system integrators and scrum masters are wanted.
That’s it for now. Please, join our community on Telegram and share your thoughts, ask the questions, I could address in our next engineering blog, planned for after the platforms public release in June.
Kaspar
