This morning at Lift 2016 I presented a few use cases we are working on in collaboration with RWE. RWE is a large energy company headquartered in Germany providing utilities to 30 million+ customers.

RWE is surprisingly open to transformational technologies, and similarly frank with regards to the difficulties they are encountering in today’s energy market.

RWE sees Blockchain as an integral part of a new series of technologies to be introduced to their core businesses, and together we are exploring how charging electric vehicles could be transformed by optimising both human to machine and machine to machine (M2M) transactions.

The first one of these projects is an autonomous electric charging station, integrating a smart contract that allows users to rent the station, put up a deposit, charge their car, then get their deposit back.

So, beside the end user experience, what would make this solution superior to a centralized one? Well simplified billing for one: the charging station works on behalf of RWE and handles user authentication, payment processing and loyalty point assignments as part of one single immutable transaction.

Second, it aims to get rid of the centralized server. Here, RWE makes proper use of the public blockchain by leveraging a shared resource and paying only for what it uses. In effect, they are renting access to the world computer, Ethereum.

Third, it guarantees fraud proof accounting — all the transactions take place on the blockchain allowing them to have complete transparency which could have many regulatory advantages in the future.

Last but not least, using blockchain makes onboarding channel partners a breeze, by leveraging open APIs instead of impenetrable service oriented architectures.

From point of sale to statiscal analysis, objects and services can syncrhonise around a common blockchain state

For more information on this exciting partnership and a few more use cases around micropayments, please check out the Lift archived feed at http://livestream.com/liftconference/events/4805866/videos/112057104

Note: an edited youtube video (minus the slides technical glitch of this morning) will be made available shortly.