Digital business does not have geographical boundaries. All blockchain businesses are global players from Day 1, regardless of sector. However, considering the especially global impact of the energy sector, e.g. climate change, we are committed to coordinate early and openly with energy blockchain stakeholders worldwide - who are nonetheless bound by national energy regulations.
We are a diverse group of decentralized energy systems veterans and blockchain developers, users, and enthusiasts collaborating in the #wg-energy channel of slack.bundesblock.de and in pilots, accumulating knowhow wrt challenges and chances of this new technology in the energy sector, and disseminating this knowledge.
This GitHub Repository of mainly smart contract specifications and implemetations, as well as project descriptions as calls for comparative studies and fundamental research, is one such dissemintation action.
Programs/Contracts publicly audited and persisted to run on a blockchain have a hyper-standardization effect that far exceeds the positive effects of standardized data exchange protocols. With such a logic one can completely automate most of already hyper-standardized energy market processes in Germany - that traditionally still take upto couple of days or months due to data and process integration difficulties across organizational boundaries.
This repository aims at keeping German energy sector stakeholders up-to-date on blockchain and smart contract developments, whilst also letting the energy blockchain stakeholders benefit from decade long experience in energy market deregulation and market communication standardization as a way of effective liberalization.
We acknowledge that the German regulation has been very strict and biased towards consumer protection for good reasons. However, since blockchain technology, among other innovations, enables end user sovereignty, we believe, our combined work here can demonstrate the potential of both increased efficiency as well as increased consumer/producer protection in a blockchain-enabled energy sector.
Energy Smart Contracts must comply with national energy regulations. In analogon to Software and Website localization, ideally energy smart contracts can be localized according to different national rules and regulations. A digital business or DApp should be able to use a smart contract library that automatically switches the energy smart contract to the locale of its user.
In this repository we will focus on such localized smart contracts, as well as programmatically tackle a few challenges that are of interest to the Energy Committee in the German Blockchain Association and the greater Blockchain for Energy Community.
Smart Contract Specifications, Comments and Improvement proposals, and Implementations receive a “Token of Appreciation”. This token will be at the very least a reputation mechanism. However, we are also exploring in the German Blockchain Association how these tokens can be tied to an open source licensing agreement and/or bounty programs, which automatically distributes any proceeds directly to the respective contributors according to a sensible incentive scheme (see List of Projects)
All discussions and progress happens publicly via:
- Gitter (in progress)
- GitHub issues and pull requests
Key contributors will additionally be invited to join the channel #wg-energy in the Slack of the German Blockchain Association, where the initial specification and ideas for further development areas are discussed together with blockchain developers and other energy associations.
We have collected a first batch of projects with interesting aspects, which surfaced during the preparations of our position paper (in DE). We divide the projects into categories of interest: [UNI] for university seminars and research projects, [H4X] as challenges for hackathon participants, and [INO] finance and business model innovation through tokenization in the energy sector. Whereas these topics are relevant globally, their positioning in the German energy regulatory framework is of special interest in this repository.
[UNI] Comparative Studies
- P2P Energy Sharing via Cloud Computing (-as-a-Service, Web2.0) vs. via Blockchain (DApp, Web3.0)
- Data Exchange Platforms, especially wrt GDPR
- Accounting and Billing as-a-service vs. as-a-DApp vs. in-protocol
[H4X] Grand Slam Smart Contract Challenges
- Supplier change : challenge “1-Click”
- Certificate of Origin: challenge “Most Original"
- Flexibility trading: challenge “Evolutionary”
[INO] Tokenize all the Things
- Token of Appreciation - additional incentives for community contributions
- Energy Donation Token - transparency and control over impact of donations
- Energy Investment Token - liquidity in decentralized energy resources market
- Standard Energy Token - “interoperability of value” between any energy DApps