WePower: A Global Green Energy Network Powered by Smart Contracts
Interest in green energy is on the rise, though for now most green energy projects around the world work on limited local scale and therefore struggle to make a meaningful impact on the world’s energy market and environment.
This is what an experienced team of energy market experts, energy grid specialists, blockchain advisors, and international investment professionals set out to change with a new kind of P2P open green energy trading platform called WePower.
WePower aims to bring pure business sense into doing good and going green. Its ambition is to connect small private green energy producers as well as bigger and even institutional producers with global energy consumers, such as households, private energy buyers, and even investors.
The worldwide WePower network will:
- Decrease pollution by CO2 emitted to the atmosphere;
- Cut the cost of power purchase arrangement by 17–20% or generate the same interest from green energy investments;
- Decrease cost of raising capital for renewable project financing, which increases the return over equity ratio by 25%;
- Increase capital flow into the renewable energy sector, without which we cannot reach 100% green energy level.
The full version of the WePower Whitepaper can be viewed here: https://wepower.network/WhitePaper-WePower.pdf
WePower rethought the classical supply-and-demand model and went for a slightly different twist. WePower producers will generate green energy and feed it into their energy grid. WePower buyers can be anywhere in the world and buy green energy although the energy they consume may come from any source. The contribution that the buyer makes to green energy production and to cutting CO2 emissions remains the same, because the energy he bought is being produced and will be consumed by someone, somewhere, regardless of the exact energy that is received by the buyer. Because climate change is a global phenomenon, it has to be addressed on a global scale. WePower cannot simply depend on a local connection between a buyer and a seller, because it has to enable anyone to participate anywhere.
Public Blockchain Levels the Playing Field
This led to a big challenge for WePower to solve: if the producer and the buyer never meet, how would they trust each other? How can the producer be certain that the buyer pays for the energy sold? And how can the buyer be certain that his money actually does leads to the production of an equivalent amount of green energy?
This is why WePower currently leverages public blockchain technology via the Ethereum network. As other distributed network protocols, such as Bitcoin, begin to enable greater smart contract flexibility, they will become candidates for WePower energy trade deployments.
To put it simply, blockchain is an always growing database that is not stored in one single place, but distributed. It is not controlled by one single user or entity, but updated continuously in an immutable fashion. Every new piece of information added to the database is automatically verified within the network, receives a timestamp, and cannot be altered once it’s created. This allows WePower to create smart contracts between producers and buyers with transaction finality. The contracts are concluded automatically and form a transaction between producer and buyer that cannot be disputed or changed by anyone. More so than paper-based agreements, this means the open WePower market is absolutely reliable.
On the public Ethereum blockchain, green energy generated becomes an entry in the ledger called an energy token. Each token stands for a certain amount of energy produced and is owned by the producer.
If a buyer decides to buy green energy, they buy a certain amount of energy tokens. The value of this purchase goes directly to the owner of the tokens. Like this, the buyer knows for certain that the energy was or will be produced. And the producer gets paid automatically.
Whoever owns energy tokens also owns a certain amount of green certificates. These certificates help WePower users to understand what the green energy they produce, own, or buy actually achieves, because they show the CO2 emissions each energy producer, consumer, or investor helped save.
Transparency Across the Grid
So every WePower user knows at any moment how much energy they produced or are predicted to produce, or how much energy they bought and own and can consume. Additionally, they know what amount of CO2 emissions their contribution helped to avoid since the open WePower market is absolutely transparent.
As you can see from the above WePower platform scheme, WePower will be connected to the energy grid and global exchange markets. This will lead to creation of the new generation utility based on core principles of decarbonisation, democratisation, and decentralisation. To reach this goal, WePower has a team of 14 highly experienced energy engineers, which is led by Kaspar Kaarlep and Heikki Kolk, creators of the first countrywide smart metering system in Estonia.
It is this aspect of the technology that makes the reach of WePower truly universal. Anyone in the world can buy green energy and contribute to its growth — even if the producer is located on the other side of the globe.
And practically everyone can become a producer. Smart contracts allow one to enter future obligations that are stored safely in the database. Like this, a producer can start generating green energy without an upfront investment, because WePower’s predictive AI capability estimates the energy produced by a new solar panel or wind plant and allows the producer to sell some of this future energy right now. The income raised from this sale can be spent to set up the actual power plant. Becoming a producer is even possible for those who cannot afford to build a plant provided that they live in a country where the energy grid system allows users to feed energy into the network.
Public blockchain technology is what makes the WePower concept possible. It turns energy markets from a rigid localized supply-and-demand system to a global and open network that everyone can participate in.
WePower will issue WPR tokens, which are backed by real assets — energy. Its token accrues energy that you can use or sell and its real value grows with the expansion of WePower.
Disclosure: Author is a member of the advisory team at WePower.
