Renewable Energy “on chain”, new workshop and framework customer for Unibright Unibright.io Follow Mar 9 · 5 min read

Using blockchain technology to trade energy and track the corresponding data is one of the most promising applications of distributed ledger technology.

Unibright is working with an innovative German startup providing renewable energy by decentralised hydroelectric power plants. Unibright Solutions provided two initial workshops to prepare the usage of the Unibright Framework for energy trading, monitoring, data analysis and integration.

Evolution of the energy market and systems

In the last decades, established centralized fossil fuel-based energy systems have been facing major challenges, e.g. the critical consideration of (carbon-)emission, environment pollution, long-distance transmission and energy crisis in general. As a partial answer, to solve these mentioned issues, the concept of a “smart grid” has been introduced: Communication technology is used along with interconnected power systems and smart metering to improve the utilization of renewable energy sources from various sources.

The needed and currently ongoing transition and structural changes is summarized nicely in the following chart:

By Bartz/Stockmar, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69505750

Project “Stromboje” (Power buoy) — a novel hydroelectric power plant

The German company “Wasserkraft Mittelrhein” is a highly innovative player, aiming to generate clean and renewable energy by the usage of novel hydro electric power plants (buoys). These power buoys generate electricity by converting the power of a river’s current using a more then 8 feet long rotor. Weighing over 7 tons and having a length of around 36 feet, one power buoy can generate electricity to 100 households.

The current pilot phase of the project, in which Unibright is engaged as the blockchain technology provider — installs 16 power buoys into the river rhine generating approx. 6.4M kilowatt hour of electricity per year. Thereby, over 1,000 households can be served with energy, and in return more than 6,000 tons of greenhouse gas, which would have been emitted using traditional coal powered power plants, can be saved. One of the main advantages of these novel power plants compared to solar energy and wind turbines, is the fact that they are able to provide power constantly, using the river’s current.

The “Stromboje” pilot in the river rhine.

Unibright’s energy in the project

Unibright with its team of blockchain specialists, architects, developers and consultants has been asked to provide the needed blockchain based solutions for energy trading, metering, data analysis and integration.

Workshop

We started with a two workshops by unibright.solutions to explore the potential and the various fields where Blockchain technology can be utilized within the solution:

Energy trading: The main goal for an alternative energy source is to provide energy that is consumed directly and locally. Remaining energy has to be fed/routed to the main network provider and is compensated according to the “German Renewable Energy Sources Act” (EEG 2017)

Metering: The constant flow of produced energy, consumed energy and routed energy has to be metered and monitored to provide the correct accounting and announcement of surplus energy for the main network provider

Data Analysis: Being a pilot project in a new segment of alternative energy, the accumulated data on energy production, consumption and feed is a value on its own. Data Ownership, governance and monetization of data is considered as a dedicated vertical of the startup

Integration: As with all technical oriented there is a lot of integration work. Not only internally within the project (energy sources, consumers), but also externally towards auditors, regulators, network providers, accounting units and many more.

Unibright Framework

The Unibright Framework will be used to provide two major pillars of the productive solution: Smart contract generation and integration. There is potential for different levels where smart contracts can act within the solution, e.g. representing energy tokens or data tokens, or establishing an contractual relationship between energy producer and consumer including automatic billing and payment. This will be done by dedicated Templates within the Unibright Workflow Designer and code generation by the Unibright Lifecycle Manager.

The internal data and process modelling has to be connected and integrated to existing data standards and demands from external parties like auditors, regulators and network providers. This will be done by dedicated smart adaptors within the Unibright Connector.

The Unibright Explorer will be used to provide Dashboards to monitor the internal transactions and APIs for “external” users (like consumers) to monitor their consumption and data usage.

Unibright co-founders Marten and Stefan inside the Stromboje

Next steps

Currently, the first pilot buoy has been installed in river Rhine, mainly to collect data on the river’s current and to provide information for external auditors in terms of environmental sustainability and stability of the construct. All innovative ideas, milestones and roadmaps have to be adjusted according to the regulator and external funding, and the goal is to have 16 buoys installed, producing energy and using Unibright technology by the beginning of 2021.