Massive crypto adoption is happening in the energy sector and no-one is noticing

I have followed /r/cryptocurrency for many years and the general sentiment I see is: to stay safe buy BTC/ETH and if you want to allocate a part of your portfolio to more risky assets; buy something else from Top20/50 like Link, Litecoin, Monero etc. What I also see a lot is the idea (usually related to memecoins to be fair) that low cap alts are no better than the casino or worse, and while mostly true I do think that this also introduces some unnecessary laziness. ETH was a low cap once and some of the people who bought ETH early didn't just get lucky, they managed to identify the potential of smart contracts on a blockchain. It is possible to identify potential in this space that isn't a 'what-we-already-have killer' (ETH-killer, DeFi-but-better, stablecoin-but-better, Memecoin-killer etc).

In my opinion one of the most overlooked usecases for blockchain is in Energy: firstly the world is moving from centralised Energy production and distribution to a decentralised version. We are seeing more and more household solar and batteries - with electric vehicles being a big asset for increasing distributed batteries. This is completely inline with our work to gradually become more independent of fossil fuels and having a more stable and flexible grid. Secondly as part of the green transition we need to be able to verify where the energy we use is coming from so companies, households and blockchains actively can chose how 'green' they want to be.

Blockchain can help by giving every Distributed Energy Resource (DER) a Decentralised ID (DID) and verifying Distributed Renewable Energy Certificates (D-RECs). DERs can trade Energy between each other just like we currently trade tokens between each other on the Blockchain. No need for a middle man and much more effective than what the middle man could ever do anyway when it comes to billions of devices interacting.

One Blockchain that almost never gets mentioned in here has been working on this silently since 2017. Their DApps are already being used in 21 countries, they currently have 44 enterprise validators, they have made multi year deals with some of the biggest companies in the world to sell D-RECs and they have onboarded some of the biggest bitcoin miners. Let's Dive in:

Green Proofs for Bitcoin: One year ago BlackRock said: "BlackRock is encouraged that organizations such as RMI and Energy Web are developing programs to bring greater transparency to sustainable energy usage in bitcoin mining, and will follow progress around those initiatives." (https://www.blackrock.com/institutions/en-us/insights/bitcoin-private-trust). Green Proofs for Bitcoin is the solution they are encouraged by and following the progress off. This solution is now live at https://gp4btc.org/ and if I were to guess BlackRock will want to buy Bitcoins that are mined by certified green miners. I will repeat: BlackRock wants verifiably green BTC, they are encouraged by Energy Web who have just launched a solution to make this happen. Ever seen that animation where South America and Africa fit perfectly on the map?

D-RECs: South Pole Global are using the Energy Web blockchain to create D-RECs https://youtu.be/KUY8kUauaPU (watch 17-26min). Buyers of these solutions include Microsoft, Google(who have given a multiple million dollar grant to Energy Web), Heineken, CocaCola, SonyCSL, Mitsubishi. What's more; from Netflix's sustainability report from 2022 we see that they will offset their 6 billion ton Carbon Footprint through Powertrust (using South Pole Global and therefore Energy Web) and they will purchase Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) 378.000 litres through SABA (using Energy Web) to offset the carbon emissions from air travel. Another example: Prosus is a global tech investment group with over 15k employees and Prosus has committed to buy 3GWh (3 million kWhs) of D-RECs from South Pole, between 2022-2025.

Energy Web was founded by Rocky Mountain Institute among others and is working to create global standards for energy. It is becoming the go to for billion dollar companies and the biggest bitcoin miners to offset carbon emissions and publicly verify 'proof of green'.

DER Marketplaces: one example of a energy marketplace/grid management solution is project EDGE. The trial is based in the AusNet Services distribution area within Victoria. The intent is to use this to demonstrate capabilities which can then be replicated across other areas of the National Electricity Market (NEM). ( https://aemo.com.au/en/initiatives/major-programs/nem-distributed-energy-resources-der-program/der-demonstrations/project-edge ). Here is a walk through of the Energy Web tech that is deployed: https://www.energyweb.org/case-study-project-edge/ - to repeat Energy Web has for many years had a working product in Australia for their National Electricity Market. Did anyone ever ask you if you could name an example of a real world use case of Blockchain, so far we have gone through several: both on country and on billion dollar organisation scale!

Note you can explore 50 projects from 25 countries here: https://www.energyweb.org/projects/ and in general the website is great for getting an idea of what Energy Web are doing, no chance to get it all in one post. There is so much more to say, but I will end with this:

All solutions need to be secured, this happens in decentralised compute environments called worker node networks secured by Energy Web Tokens.

Companies validating the EWC and part of the non-profit Energy Web Foundation include: Vodafone, Deloitte, Deutsche Telekom, Acciona, EDF, PTT, Shell, Volkswagen, Iberdrola, Stedin, AES, Austrian Power Grid and many many more. We are not talking about a random peer to peer energy trading blockchain, we are talking about global standards being developed, deployed and used. This post is only scratching the surface of what has been happening in the Energy sector while whatever memetoken/NFT of the day has captured much more attention than they should.