As a company based in the EU, we are defined by the rules and regulations surrounding our industry. However, these change over time and, recently, we were invited to engage in a formalized discussion regarding topics of interest to the European Commission and their associated regulatory bodies.

Specifically, we have recently attended the 10th Citizens’ Energy Forum held in Dublin Castle, Dublin, Ireland — The opening session of which was chaired by Dominique Ristori, the director-general of the Directorate-General for Energy within the European Commission.

Our CFO, Cristian Bogdan, spoke at the breakout session held on day one regarding “future-proofed retail energy markets for consumers”, chaired by Renatas Mazeika (Head of Unit Consumer Policy at The Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers — DG JUST), and attended by, among others, Cameron Belton (Economic and Social Research Institute — ESRI), Jonas Katz (Danish Energy Agency), Anett Ludwig (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband e.V — the German consumer federation), and Natalie McCoy (Council of European Energy Regulators — CEER). This session was recorded and is available for your viewing pleasure, here (Cristian’s presentation starts at 1:19:35).

Restart Energy’s CFO, Cristian Bogdan, presenting at the 10th Citizens’ Energy Forum

Throughout the course of his presentation, Cristian presented the “Risks and Benefits of Blockchain-based Energy Retail Technologies”. The risks covered were: transaction speed, quality control, public perception, energy consumption, and application integration. Whilst the benefits covered were: microgrids, energy tokenization and peer-to-peer systems, local energy self-sufficiency, automated invoicing, streamlining of costs, and transparency and immutable ledgers. This was done using the RED Platform and its accompanying SWAZM blockchain, as a future user-centric use-case model.

For those of you that wish to have a more in-depth look into Cristian’s speech and the topics covered, we have prepared his full in-depth notes in a separate unlisted article here.

Not only was our CFO able to show the benefits of blockchain within the energy industry, but was also able to confidently respond to the attending experts on regulation and consumer rights, ultimately providing a meaningful contribution to the larger debate on blockchain and peer-to-peer regulation. The conclusions of this breakout session were as such — The Forum:

Calls for avoiding deepening the divide between well informed and active consumers, and the passive or vulnerable who risk staying behind, taking into account the large variety of models and ways to deliver energy via digital and technology-based innovative solutions.

Stresses the need for greater regulatory oversight and cooperation amongst regulators for new models and solutions, such as dynamic pricing and bundled offers, which often are cross-sectorial in nature.

Highlights the importance of enabling consumers to exercise control over the services that they use.

Underlines the necessity of increased awareness amongst market actors, inter alia by using better data, on the different types of consumers, including their preferences, consumption patterns particularly for prosumers.

Calls upon all stakeholders to ensure that engagement with energy citizens takes into account, including by using insights from behavioral science, their different needs, and life circumstances.

Highlights the need to avoid cross-subsidization between different groups of consumers that can exacerbate energy poverty.

Within the EU, as outlined within the session itself, regulation follows debate, and the 10th Citizens’ Energy Forum is one of the tools used by the European Commission to inform its choices and law-making. We are grateful and feel privileged to have been part of this ongoing debate, and we hope that we have managed to further the case for blockchain and peer-to-peer technologies in the wider sphere of energy regulation within the EU.

Crisitan Bogdan | CFO Restart Energy & Renatas Mazeika | Head of Unit Consumer Policy at DG JUST

About The EC’s Annual Citizens’ Energy Forum

The European Commission launched the Citizens’ Energy Forum in 2008. It meets on an annual basis and aims to explore consumers’ perspective and role in a competitive, ‘smart’, energy-efficient and fair energy retail market. As such, the Forum serves to structure the debate and channel consumers’, regulators’ and industry’s views on the energy market and its future, directly feeding into the work of the Commission at in the energy and consumer policy areas. You can find out more details on the European Commission’s 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: 1,700% 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 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.

We invite you to join our RED Platform’s beta and earn 50 MWAT for joining now; refer your friends for even more rewards.