Transactive Grid: A Decentralized Energy Management Solution

Transcript

[Music] transactive grid is a uh is a joint venture between sure can you hear me okay is a joint venture between consensus and low three energy I think you all know who consensus is uh low three energy is an energy uh development firm what we're doing is uh building micro grids uh small versions of utility grids that can operate uh alongside or separate from the larger utility

grid so there's really good reasons uh to want to build microG grids uh first and foremost the um the cost of renewable energy is actually reaching a point where it's competitive with centralized energy but more importantly um things like this happen Hurricane Sandy came through New York a couple of years ago knocked out big chunks of the utility grid you can see that most of lower Manhattan was down during that time except for this segment which was up and running so the reason that happened is that uh this section actually had its own generation and could separate from the utility grid and run on its own its own power I think John's going to speak

next maybe I'll just grab this um so uh in our efforts to sort of build the the Brooklyn micr grid uh we started interacting with uh community members in the Park Slope and guanas uh neighborhoods of Brooklyn and this is Martha she's been in the community for 40 years uh that's her PBR array on her rooftop and she actually has a surplus she she produces more uh electricity than she consumes um and so what we wanted to explore as we were building the micr grid was is there an opportunity to allow Martha to actually transact um peer-to-peer potentially within the micro grid and so this was uh actually the sandbox that we identified within the

community where we're building the micro grid on a street called President Street and it's a really cool street because half of the on one side of the street you can see Martha's house and a bunch of her neighbors and they've got really big uh really cool solar arrays and then in in the corner there you can see what part of Brooklyn um that's located in and then on the other side of the street um are their neighbors so these are potential consumers um and so so this is a concept where Martha and her side of the street can become prosumers and uh their friends and Neighbors on the other side can become consumers within this uh within the sandbox uh and so I just want to give a bit of cont context with respect to the Renewable Energy Credit market and how that works in the United States um so

essentially right now you can buy uh what's known as a wreck and a wre is essentially an attribute um that that attests to a megawatt of renewable energy that's generated by some uh source and so that could be like a wind farm in Idaho or a solar farm in Texas and so that uh facility generates a megawatt and in doing so it is issued a renewable energy credit which it can then sell on and so what you'll have is utilities um purchasing renewable energy credits to satisfy state requirements for green energy now the problem is often times these wrecks then get sold on again uh and so you're double counting the value of that uh

sort of green energy um and so uh that was one of the first initial problems that we identified with this system um the other problem is it's kind of a meta system um yes the facilities that gen you know that wind farm in Idaho is um producing green energy and that does have a net positive effect on the global environment but that doesn't actually mean anything at the local community level in Brooklyn where uh uh residents of that community may actually be purchasing those wrecks from third party providers so what that means is that uh the electrons that are actually produced off of that wind farm uh that you're buying your green energy from don't ever actually reach you so uh energy produced

in the neighborhood within your uh local micro grid actually has the potential to make it uh to your house uh so there's less loss in transporting that energy um you know transporting energy is actually pretty lossy especially when uh summer comes along all the air conditioning turns on and uh the lines get hot and start sagging um the thing that's really necessary to do some of this is data and a lot of this data can be provided by smart meters so those Smart Meters uh and the concept of pulling this uh pulling the macro gr down to the micro uh brought us to this idea of transactive grid uh and so I'll just talk a little bit about sort of the current iteration

of of of the Prototype and so the smart meters then effectively become oracles where in essentially you can tokenize the consumption profile and so you can represent essentially proxy electrons with a token um and so in this example we've got Martha and her neighbor um and so her smart meter she produces a surplus her neighbor can then purchase that Surplus um and so this is important to realize because physics tells us that the electrons that Martha produces from her PV array will go to the nearest load so the nearest load is probably her neighbor's refrigerator um and so the transactive grid is essentially the the layer the business Logic on top of which this sort

of transaction Can Can Happen um and so this kind of a system uh now gives consumers a choice they can choose to uh purchase sort of renewable energy credits from third party retailers um or they can choose to now purchase uh effectively renewable energy credits you know in the form of a token from their neighbor directly so the important thing is that um you know we're looking at this as an evolution of utilities uh don't get us wrong recks are incredible things and actually re have done a lot to drive down the cost of distributed generation Renewable Power around the world uh but that's a market that's ready for

evolution uh it's a market that you know distributed generation the cost of actually installing distributed Power is coming down so much that you know there is a potential to do it a different way so this is an evolution of this works on top of the existing utility structure we're not trying to displace any utilities at this point um so talk so in the back end we're building so um consensus is is building the smart contract foundation for this uh for this project and so what we have is as John mentioned the Smart Energy meter can act

as an oracle that will actually create the these energy tokens uh once uh it measures that uh electrons have been produced by the PV and so this goes then to to uh uh Martha who can then sell these tokens potentially to her neighbor and uh so the neighbors would then consume the tokens so you can have uh so you have the neighbors um smart meter will then sense that she's using energy

and then can uh uh destroy the tokens from there so right now we have uh custom token contracts and uh we're currently working towards uh replacing them with uh uh with the standard token contracts that that were discussed earlier this is kind of self-explanatory we arrived at ethereum pretty quickly for all the obvious reasons um and so so all of this sort of um brings us to this concept of a community energy Market sharing economy um and and so certainly we've seen the rise of the sharing economy play

prominent role certainly Uber Airbnb Etc and and we think the community energy Market sharing economy has some foundational components so that's tokenization effectively what Christian just described um peer-to-peer markets which so peer-to-peer transactivity is inherent to distributed consensus systems um and we think the rise of the prummer will be uh another foundational element to this economy wherein um folks can purchase PBR arays and they can actually produce they have generative capacity um rather than just being sort of consumers in this oneway relationship with the utility uh it's actually a pretty important concept to understand because

not only is there value in the production of energy uh on the grid but there's also value on the reduction of energy so prosumers can not only produce energy that then gets used by themselves or their neighbors but they can also reduce the energy that's being consumed so in essence you can tokenize the value of a megawatt and a negawatt the the uh absence of that use so this would come together in uh or this is coming together in the Brooklyn Micro grid as a community Esco uh this is a a borp a public benefits corporation uh and it runs as a nonprofit that then transacts the energy or sells the energy back and forth to the community um from the people that

are producing energy to the people that are consuming the uh the energy in the future uh maybe I'll just talk real quick about future Milestones um so there's this concept of smart meter proliferation and recently New York State um announced that in the coming year there will be upwards of five or six million Smart Meters installed throughout the state um and this is significant because um it's a it's a substantial upgrade um to sort of the ex existing infrastructure and it will give us much richer data sets so much more functional Oracle if you will um and and this seems to be the case globally um smart met

will be a reality all over the world in the very near future and then so that iPhone uh display image is is how we envision um ultimately the user interface something very easy um we don't Envision an interface where um consumers or prosumers or users are bombarded with a ton of options and and so something that looks like a trading kind of interface uh instead we want to make it very simple so that you can just sort of set um uh your system to the things that you care about so in this case you know you've got the dollar sign so maybe you're more interested in maximizing your financial benefit or maybe you're more interested in you know maximizing environmental benefits or

Community benefits Etc and so the system can then adjust accordingly um and we feel this is a critical component going forward so that you'll have a sort of beneficent sort of automated Google driving car type system that manages your Energy Efficiency life essentially so the potential we see in the future uh and something that we're working on now is the ability to actually control grid infrastructure uh across um the ethereum network using blockchain technology this is a really interesting infographic that um shows a lot of the equipment that's connected uh and you know transporting information back and forth across the utility grid um you know there are obvious benefits

to this from a security perspective um there are also benefits that could be had um from an equity perspective as communities start to own a bit more of their own assets uh I think Christian's going to speak to this I guess okay so so this could be uh a potential UI like a dashboard where you can see um exactly what benefits you're getting how much uh uh you buying from each neighbor for instance uh so you can see there you have a little leaderboard going on there where where

U uh Na neighbor 3 is in the lead and so this is kind of what we want to present to the user to abstract away the the underlying market so so in the in the uh uh on the back end on the contract layer this would actually be tokens being created and destroyed uh the token implements the standard contract interface so they can be traded on on a on an exchange like ether X for instance and so that's going to be at the back end and it's going to be visualized as as this you know nice easy to consume UI

and and also as as Lawrence mentioned you would be able to set it based on these high level values like I I want to you know I want to save money I want more green energy I want to buy from my local community Etc right so um the amount of energy that people are actually consuming using could save or could buy across this is probably less interesting uh you know from a dollar perspective so the intent is to connect when it gets down to the consumer level uh connect us through reputation uh into social networks uh so that we can actually provide some of the things that people care about other than you know the few dollars a month they

might have saved or generated uh across the system so this is the core team we've been working on this thing probably about uh seven eight months now and do we have time for question any questions yeah okay oh question back here sorry uh yeah you can so we're looking at other ways that uh that you can collect the information without a smart meter um smart meters are becoming pretty ubiquitous but uh there are also

uh quite a few Technologies out there that can that can approximate that it's easiest to use the utilities meter because the utility is supplying your energy they're actually billing you against what happens on that meter so our network is obviously going to be as good as that another question yes what's the name again can you repeat it yeah maybe show us after sounds good great all right thank you so much thank you