Electricity and the blockchain are closely linked, at the very least due to the fact that mining requires a lot of energy, but DLT solutions can also push towards a more efficient and environmentally friendly use of energy sources.
In Estonia, WePower started uploading and storing all data related to purchase contracts and energy consumption on the blockchain a few months ago, after concluding an agreement with Elering, a large local independent producer.
The idea is to tokenize all consumption and production data in order to open up a digitized energy market, first by connecting and tokenizing meter data for domestic or industrial use, then putting this data on the Elering market.
During this process, data related to 26,000 hours of electrical use per 24 Twt of power were uploaded, generating 39 million tokens.
These data can be exchanged with companies that offer energy, but WePower in this has made an ecological choice, allowing access exclusively to companies that produce energy from renewable sources.
Currently, 85% of the energy in the Baltic countries is still produced from traditional, non-renewable and polluting sources, while only 15% comes from green sources and this often makes them inaccessible to end users.
With this choice, WePower wants to improve the contact between ecological producers and end users, thus giving an indirect incentive to the ecological system by providing an already ready market structure.
Of course, the evolution of the system poses challenges that will become increasingly pressing as the success of the initiative grows. In fact, on the one hand, if the mechanism will be successful it will be necessary to increase the available renewable sources and on the other, WePower uses an ERC20 token that could pose scalability problems in the long run.
