2018 has been a busy year for Restart Energy, that saw us making significant progress towards achieving many previously targeted expansion goals. In fact, our announcement channel on Telegram and our Medium blog have been extremely active over the last few months, showcasing our recent developments. There are many more planned announcements about ongoing events that we wish to share with you soon, once these reach fruition.

Following up on last month’s productive meeting between our CEO, Armand Doru Domuța, and Heliopolis’ CEO, Paolo Signoretti, an agreement has been signed between our two companies, outlining the establishment of a joint venture (JV), that will take on the role of our very first type A franchise, in Italy.

The JV will serve a double purpose, considering it represents an advantageous arrangement providing us with the perfect opportunity to enter the Italian energy market, while offering us a substantial risk reduction through Heliopolis’ local expertise and established network.

Once the JV company is active, it will benefit from Restart Energy’s marketing and sales support which will help it establish itself as a successful power retail company and our flagship type A franchise. This also means that through the future expansion of this company on the Italian energy market, the RED platform will be able to supply energy to consumers within its operational area, which will come to encompass the entire Italian peninsula.

Investments in renewables have led to Italy being able to pride itself with the fact that every town has some measure of renewable energy mixed in with its energy supply, marking the beginning of a full conversion to green energy in the hopefully not so distant future. In fact, in 2017, nearly 8,000 municipalities in Italy had within their border some form of renewable power station and 40 of these had all of their energy needs met by clean energy sources.

In 2016, Italy’s renewable landscape was dominated by hydroelectric power (39%), as it has been for over a decade; yet hydroelectric has nearly reached its full potential with a growth of around 1% per year projected for the foreseeable future — with most of this coming from mini-hydroelectric power plants set up along the smaller waterways of Italy. Other renewables are coming into their own in recent years however, especially solar, wind, and bioenergy. Data from the “Energy from Renewable Sources in Italy — 2016” statistical report shows a mix of 39% hydropower; 21% solar; 18% bioenergy; 16% wind and 6% geothermal.

Solar energy plays an important part in Italy’s energy sector, having granted it the distinction of being world leaders in solar renewable energy in 2013 (7%). In 2017, solar energy reached close to 8%, being second only to Germany on the European energy market. In the same year, solar PV capacity grew by 409 MW, up 11% from 2016; with a total of more than 730,000 solar power plants, resulting in a cumulative capacity of over 19 GW.

In recent years, Italy has joined the likes of Spain, in funding large-scale wind power projects — in 2017, Italy installed 252 MW of eolian-generated power, bringing its total wind-generated capacity to just under 9.5 GW. Wind is the fastest-growing renewable source within the country, having grown by more than ten times since 2003. By the end of 2016, there were 3,598 active power-plants, the vast majority of which (89%) are small <1 MW installations, yet paradoxically, the supermajority (90.3%) of installed power output is concentrated in less than 300 wind farms with an average output of >10 MW.

The Italian energy market is striving to allocate more resources into renewable energy sources and so far it has made substantial progress, already surpassing its renewable energy target for 2020, with over 17% of the country’s energy output coming from renewables in 2017.

As the RED platform will only feature renewable energy producers, we are delighted to tap into an energy sector brimming with potential and are confident that our first type A franchise will be a resounding success!

About Heliopolis

Heliopolis Energia is a customer-focused, leading Italian energy company, active in the renewables segment for over 10 years; with a company history of continuous growth stretching back a quarter century. Heliopolis offers a full range of services relating to engineering & consulting, asset & facility management, as well as the development of infrastructure, civil engineering, and clean energy projects.

For more information, please visit their website.

About Restart Energy

Restart Energy Democracy (RED) is a blockchain-powered platform, backed by Restart Energy — a European energy provider with 20 million USD in revenues. The company was built with a vision to democratize the energy sector and quash the dominance of legacy monopolies in the energy world. The company’s credentials include a customer base of 27,000 household and 3,000 corporate clients, expanding at more than 2,000 clients per month (5,000 new customers in the first two months of 2018), and its impressive growth: 1700% from 2015 until today.

Restart Energy is developing the world’s first peer-to-peer, fully decentralized energy transfer platform allowing users to send and receive energy worldwide, based on its proprietary virtual balancing system, that uses A.I., Big Data, and IoT technologies. The RED ecosystem is comprised of the RED-Platform, RED-Franchise and RED-MWAT Tokens.

The RED-Franchise is the first power retail franchise to simplify and allow any company or entrepreneur to operate their own power utility enterprise, enabling them to start selling energy in more than 35 deregulated energy markets globally.

MWAT tokens are crypto-tokens that enable the buying and selling of up to 1 MWh of electricity per month on the RED-Platform Software and will facilitate the development of affordable clean energy, through free-market practices. Upon completion of registration on the platform, an initial loyalty bonus of 0.11 kWh is applied. Producers send out monthly loyalty bonuses through the RED Loyalty System, totaling 1–5% of traded on-grid energy in exchange for access to the RED Platform.

Importantly, it should be noted that potential franchise partners will need to own (this is not a form of payment to us) a certain number of MWAT tokens, in order to qualify for our various franchise tiers — the secret to our award-winning growth as a business!

For more information, please visit our website, our Telegram, and read the Restart Energy whitepaper. Join our announcement channel for updates regarding Restart Energy Democracy.