Recap: ØNDER at EventHorizon
Highlights and takeaways from the ØNDER trip to Berlin
ØNDER Team was one of the 40 startups that were honored to perform at EventHorizon in Berlin. It is the global summit on blockchain technology in the energy sector. EventHorizon is the most high-profile conference in the usage of blockchain technology in the energy sector. It was an amazing experience for us to participate in such event and it was also the first public presentation of our project.
ØNDER team went to the EventHorizon with two clear goals. The first one was to deliver our message to a wide audience that the present form of the power trading is no longer actual. We got a much more profitable and technologically productive model of the power trading — flexibility trading model, that based on demand response concept (DR). DR is a power system management concept meaning reduction, increase or shifts of the usual power consumption profile by switching off/on or delaying the start of electric equipment, located in consumer’s premises for a limited timeframe in response to a signal provided by Utility, Transmission or Independent System Operator. Hence the second goal was to get feedback from the participants of EventHorzion.
All our bold statements about the power trading based on calculations in the power sector. Demand Response become a multibillion commercial offering in the power sector over just 10–15 years. However, it’s penetration is projected to go into saturation and remain low compared to market volume. The figure below describes conventional flexibility integration scenario by Navigant (2016), there other countries projected to repeat US paths and go into saturation.
Much more information will be published in the report “Demand Response: integration of flexibility into energy planning” by Sergey Rozhenko, our Market Ambassador.
The first day of EventHorizon was very impressive: there was a massive amount of speakers and participants. Observing speeches on the first day, we were pleased that our project was entirely in the context of the world agenda. Speakers discussed the technological barriers of the blockchain technology for the power sector, models of the ecosystem development, the global importance of projects for decarbonization, digitalization, deregulation of the energy business. Also, EventHorizon’s sessions covered topics such as regulatory considerations, investment strategies, security, climate change and 100% renewables, energy access, plus deep dive tracks on use cases and business models, smart contracts and other core topics for both corporates and developers.
Just a few words about the atmosphere of the conference. We see EventHorizon is a tech event like no other. Everything was in the atmosphere of a nightclub because of loud techno music and light shows. But in the meantime, it took place in the building of an old Berlin power station.
We concern that all these things were aimed to develop a new atmosphere for this type of events. Traditional energy events rarely go beyond climate change; at EventHorizon, the issue dominated the first morning’s keynotes, Distributed energy resources (DER) integration was cited heavily as a way to avert environmental disaster; blockchain — in many guises — will help integrate DER.
Event Horizon was organized by the Energy Web Foundation (EWF), whose founding partners the Rocky Mountain Institute and Grid Singularity were highly visible in the keynotes.
On the first day, our team were able to exchange views with many experienced investors and energy companies. We came up with interesting ideas and, as it happens, completely revised our presentation on the last night. Many thanks to our curator Irene Adamsky for the opportunity to change our actual presentation on the last minute.
On the second day, we presented ØNDER project. And here are three key points of our message. ØNDER provides:
1. High-speed and low-cost transactions
Everyone is aware of the main problem of blockchain technology — the scalability problem, that refers to the discussion concerning the limits on the amount of transactions the bitcoin network can process.
For energy, the issue of scaling is especially acute, since real effects are achievable only with a large number of high-speed transactions. The use of our state-channel technology solves this problem.
2. Model of markets and services
ØNDER is a set of open tools for the development and interaction of decentralized applications (dApps) among themselves on our platform. Accounting and micropayments are derived from the application functionality and implemented in the protocol logic, which is the execution mechanism for dApps. This approach allows you to organize an unlimited number of services and markets using ØNDER. At the same time, platform users are not tied to a specific service. Users can choose any services, by the offers that this services made to them. The layer of the accounting and settlement protocol ensures their seamless interaction.
Thus, ØNDER is the accounting and settlement infrastructure platform, the set of all necessary building blocks for the development of energy applications in the power sector, and the ecosystem for the platform participants.
3. As many tokens as needed
Our tokenization model allows you to generate an unlimited amount of different tokens for different services. This means that within the development and service of Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), the developer independently decides what token is necessary for him — whether he wants to bind the token to a unit of energy, or to the cost of the service, or to a specific amount of fiat money — this is only the developer’s solution. In this case, the DER platform token provides the necessary communication between services. In perspective, this can solve the problem of combining energy markets
And for all these complex explanations, the most important thing is that the platform should become a unifier of fragmented energy markets and actors with conflicting interests. ØNDER provides all features of the blockchain system for companies of the power sector without the necessity to invest in expensive technologies, any losses in time and risks.
Key Takeaways
We understood that our team moves in the right direction. Also, we realized that our message about flexibility trading has to be more clear and comprehensible. One more was that we met so much like-minded people, which were very interested in our ØNDER project. Also, we had a lot of important acquaintances during networking parts of the EventHorizon. Many thanks to organizers for the opportunity and the incredible atmosphere at the event!
Moving Forward
Next, we went to HannoverMesse to demonstrate our stand with already implemented solutions on it.
The ØNDER team
