WePower engineering team’s blog #5: Updates regarding the pilot project with Elering

It’s time to share some exciting updates regarding our nationwide energy tokenization project with Elering. The Energy Smart Contracts for Ethereum and EOS are in place and we are now working on auditing as well as preparations for large-scale testing and the public release.

The first tokenization event will happen early this autumn, in the beginning of October the latest. The next engineering sprints will give a more clear time estimation.

In the first event, we will focus on testing and demonstrate the way energy ownership in Energy Smart Contract form looks like and how the contracts will be settled against the local energy market. The main goal of this test is to try out high volume energy tokenization and settling on the WePower platform.

For that, we will be using nationwide consumption data volumes in hourly measurements for fixing the amount of energy owned by a consumer for a certain period of time. The contracts will be time-stamped and they will be settled when the period is reached, either by consumption or selling on the wholesale level.

The main components of the test include testing the interface with Estfeed, finalizing the dataset preparation, then getting ready for the ESC life-cycle test and then executing the sequences. In addition to analyzing the details of Energy Smart Contract generation and settling, we will look into the actual blockchain related data for that kind of purpose, such as cost and volume.

Later on, more tests are planned to explore different aspects of the secondary Energy Smart Contract marketplace dynamics. Meaning that we will go into more detail regarding various events that can happen with market participants and contracts during the Energy Smart Contract lifecycle (including peer-to-peer trading of contracts, change in consumption profiles etc). These tasks will assure us that once we have live auctions happening on WePower platform and energy is being sold, we are ready to react to different real-life situations.

As any consumption data is personal information, when preparing the Estonian dataset for the pilot we decided to take additional time to assure that the way we use it is in compliance with applicable privacy law, namely GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation that was set out to protect individuals in the EU as well as the European Economic Area (EEA). The analysis caused some delays, but the security of personal data is very important for us and we couldn’t allow taking risks.

So far, 30 engineers have contributed to our progress, which is quite a lot for a young company like ours. We are on track with the goals, there are interesting technical challenges still to be solved and after only a few months of work, we are making good progress towards our vision.

I’m thrilled to share that two very talented guys have just joined us as Head of Product and Engineering Manager for Digital Energy Systems. I will soon share a separate post introducing them and the experience they bring to the team. And we still have some open positions — check them out here!

Next updates to follow very soon. Stay tuned!

Thanks for following our journey,
Kaspar