Not long ago we sent out a tweet to identify participants interested in our alpha program. Now that we’ve received our REP certificate from the PUCT and we are nearing the technical capabilities to service energy customers, we want to start formalizing this program. We plan to reach out to interested parties to begin a dialogue which we hope will be the start of long, and fruitful relationships with our initial customers.

Alpha participants will be split into three groups.

Group A

Group A will be the largest group and will be for energy only customers. They will likely be put on a below market, fixed-priced product with a short duration. We desire to have short periods (~6 months) for this product so that we can switch alpha participants to newer products once our systems are ready to support them. All Group A participants need to live in Texas and be serviced by either Oncor or CenterPoint Energy.

Group B

Group B will also be put on a below market, fixed-priced product, and, in addition, participants in this group will receive an agent device. We expect members of this group to be more technically savvy and willing to deal with hiccups as they arise. The individuals best suited for this group are those who enjoy being on the cutting edge of technology and those who want to have more interaction with our team as we develop and roll out new features. All members of this group will receive an agent at no additional cost, other than the willingness to provide feedback on a regular basis. We have been working on additional functionality for the agent device that is tangential to energy, and this group will also be exposed to these types of applications as testers as well. We understand that not everyone will have the time available to provide feedback and test new apps on our agent, so please only request to join this group if you have the available bandwidth. All Group B participants need to live in Texas and be serviced by either Oncor or CenterPoint Energy.

Group C

Group C will be a crypto-only group with a focus to test the Grid+ agent device as a stand-alone, next generation hardware wallet. These individuals should have an interest in distributed technologies and working on open source infrastructure platforms. We plan to expose this group to multiple applications that are being developed for the agent device unrelated to energy. Ideally, all members of this group will be developers who have fairly advanced knowledge of the blockchain ecosystem. Currently, all participants need to live in the United States, and ideally for this group, outside of Texas. We plan to expand to other countries after the completion of this program.

Timeline and next steps

Current estimates project that our first prototype run of agent devices will be in September of this year. We will likely create 30 such devices, and plan to allocate 20 between participants in alpha Groups B and C. We plan to achieve full vendor integration to service energy customers by end of August/mid September which should not be a blocker for agent deployment for alpha Group B.

On the legal side, the biggest update of note is that Gabe Shapiro, our chief legal officer, has decided to leave Grid+ to take some time off in pursuit of various interests, including joining a coding bootcamp and doing more research/writing into legal issues around blockchain. Gabe is an extremely talented lawyer, and I have high expectations that he will one day make a great developer as well. I’m hopeful that we’ll rehire him in the future as a quasi dev/lawyer/jack of all trades. He helped start the process of drafting our customer agreements before leaving, so I do not anticipate legal being a blocker for our alpha launch.

If joining the Grid+ alpha program is of interest, please sign up. If you have already reached out to our team then you’re currently on our alpha list and have been allocated to Group A. If you want to be an agent tester in Group B, feel free to state that on the sign up page.