Why did we run the experiment?

Our mission is to foster the global transition to renewables by providing a streamlined way for companies to transact directly with green energy developers. The financial and legal instruments that currently exist in the market, such as Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), are too complex and expensive for corporate energy buyers. Our next generation green energy procurement and trading platform uses virtual PPAs — taking a process that usually requires years to complete to an entirely new level.

By simplifying the contract process and offering the opportunity to offtake a small share (min 0.1%) of the total volume, WePower is opening the PPA market to buyers who previously could not participate. We are enabling all companies, regardless of their size, to become greener in a cost effective and fungible way.

The nationwide energy tokenization pilot in Estonia allowed us to test the technological capabilities of Ethereum, the blockchain that sits at the core of WePower’s platform and build a solid infrastructure to allow us to run the first green energy auctions, as well as develop features for large-scale energy trading in secondary markets.

Key goals of the test

Lack of scalability is one of the biggest roadblocks when it comes to blockchain solutions for the energy market. There is also a lack of reference architectures for combining centralized IT platforms with public blockchains.

In order to succeed, we needed to:

Design a testing environment that would be realistic, yet fully compliant with privacy regulations.

Test the asynchronous integration layer between WePower’s centralized platform and a public blockchain.

Test the processing capacity needed to run the WePower trading platform at a national level.

Interesting fact: Had we not optimized the data set, storing 6.132 billion data points would have taken us roughly 14 years and cost EUR 210 million. Find out how we optimized the data in the extended Technical Report.

Why Estonia?

Estonia has great energy data infrastructure already in place. Elering’s Estfeed acted as a perfect scalable data bridge for us. The Estfeed data exchange platform facilitates secure and authorized access to energy (e.g. electricity and gas) meter consumption data by enabling end consumers, scattered producers and network operators to choose who to share their data with via the online platform e-Elering.

The data provided by Elering was anonymized by aggregating together hourly consumption data from all meter points within postcodes. Essentially, the data of all neighbors was added together, so that no single neighbor could be identified.

“Future clean and secure energy will depend on innovative solutions and consumer empowerment. However, a major barrier in most countries is the lack of access to energy data. Estfeed unlocks data access within Estonia and we are now working towards doing this on an international level. WePower’s proof of concept is important for showing how data access leads to innovation.” — Taavi Veskimägi, CEO of Elering

Results and Conclusions

26,000 hours and 24TWh of energy production and consumption data was turned into 38,973,240,000 Smart Energy Tokens.

Ethereum is mature enough to accommodate contracts with multi-year terms. There are promising alternatives available as well in the development phase, but their infancy is a concern in relation to typical durations of energy contracts.

Ethereum performance indicators are sufficient for WePower to operate the renewable energy procurement and trading platform at this stage. The hybrid platform architecture can be operated with the required cost-performance for current business needs. In order to meet increasing performance requirements in the future though, we will need to consider validating other blockchain/DLT solutions to identify more efficient systems to run the larger scale trading platform.