The first year of WePower: From tokenizing energy grids to helping businesses go green
Go to the profile of Nikolaj Martyniuk
Nikolaj Martyniuk
Jan 8
After enjoying the festive season with our family and friends, our team is ready to take on 2019. We remain focused on WePower’s mission — to enable everyone to make a change towards a sustainable energy future. First, we will focus on helping businesses go green, as they make up two thirds of global energy consumption and this gives us the chance to make a greater impact, faster, when it comes to the transition to renewables.
To continue to move forward with success, it’s important to take stock of the first year of WePower. We’re using this opportunity to highlight some of our major milestones from 2018, as well as the people and companies that have supported us along the way.
Milestones from 2018 at a glance
Roadmap for 2019
The progress in more detail: Q1 of 2018
The start of the year was marked by a major development. We partnered with Estonian TSO Elering with the aim to put nationwide energy consumption and production data on the Ethereum blockchain and tokenize it. This joint project was a turning point with two innovators working together to test blockchain’s applicability in one of the most fundamental industries to our daily lives — energy.
In the first quarter of 2018, Elering provided us with a year’s worth of real-world energy production and consumption data which allowed our engineers to kick off the pilot project.
In March, we were fortunate to welcome Peter H. Diamandis, a well-known entrepreneur, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation and an Executive Founder of Singularity University; Maja Vujinovic, the CEO of OGroup, ex-CIO of Emerging Tech at GE Digital; Trevor Townsend, Managing Director at Startupbootcamp Energy Australia; and You (Ricky) Li, Ex-CME energy derivative product manager, experienced energy and crypto trader as the members of the WePower Advisory Board. The board was formed to accelerate our business further and turn our vision of a greener sustainable living into a reality.
Q2 of 2018
In April, we graduated from StartupBootcamp (SBC) in Melbourne. SBC is the world’s second largest accelerator program, and it chose WePower to be its first portfolio company using a tokenized system to incentivize and facilitate green energy adoption — a major achievement for our company. As part of the SBC Energy Australia program, WePower will continue to receive support from some of the biggest energy companies in Australia.
Following SBC, WePower signed a strategic partnership with Energy Australia, a gas and electricity retailer with over 2.6 million customers. To our surprise, it became evident that Australia was a greater fit for our solution than most of the other countries we had on our roadmap. Read more about Australia’s market readiness from our recent What is hot in WePower article.
We also launched the alpha version of the WePower platform which allows corporate energy buyers to enter into direct contracts with energy producers in order to buy green energy at below market rates. Even though the alpha version was a demo of what the future platform would be like, it quickly attracted the attention of thousands of interested users.
Q3 — Q4 of 2018
The second half of 2018 came with even bigger milestones. We signed a major partnership with TFS Green, the Australian subsidiary of Tradition, one of the world’s largest inter-dealer brokers. Bloomberg featured the news in a dedicated article headlined Tradition to Make Energy Unit ‘Obsolete’ With Blockchain that describes how the energy market is soon expected to change for the better.
During our collaboration with TFS we were assured of our decision to focus on helping businesses go green by allowing them to start benefiting from the increasingly lower price of renewables. To our knowledge there are no great solutions for companies currently in the market to buy green energy fast, transparently and at a good price.
Only the largest corporations have found the existing option called a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) suitable. Unfortunately, PPAs aren’t a good solution for most businesses as they come with a lengthy legal process that takes about a year to get signed. They’re expensive and entirely illiquid. What we’re offering is a digital, standardized approach to this process.
In October, we launched the first results of our revolutionary energy tokenization pilot project in which we successfully uploaded 26,000 hours of energy data to blockchain creating 39 billion Smart Energy Tokens. The pilot proved that WePower’s platform is capable of handling large amounts of energy data. It means that we can use blockchain to bring trust and auditable transparency to the energy sector due to it being a public distributed ledger. With blockchain all records are time-stamped and made public which provides buyers with certainty that their money is going directly to a green energy producer.
2018 was also extraordinary thanks to the start of our collaboration with The Climate Group, which kicked off with WePower participating at the Climate Week NYC in September. Just two months later, at the RE-Source event together with Amazon, Facebook, Google, IKEA, Microsoft and 100 forward-thinking companies, we signed a declaration which calls on policymakers to remove all regulatory and administrative barriers to corporate sourcing of renewable energy.
Towards the end of the year, the platform got a major overhaul and introduced a ton of new features. We built a new auction engine that supports digital PPAs, including Smart Energy Contracts and tokenization of PPA shares. Also we added support for comparing energy production estimates with consumption profiles to support buying process.
Going Green globally
2018 was a year of change, growth and remarkable progress for WePower. Going global with our mission could be seen as a major challenge, but we are more confident than ever — especially given the strong strategic partnerships that we secured last year.
The world is keen for a change and things are happening. As Europe’s biggest economy, Germany used to be heavily dependant on coal and just last week they announced that renewables have overtaken coal as the country’s main energy source. This is just the beginning. Germany plans to exit entirely from coal as it moves towards its next milestone — 65 percent of renewables by 2030. And just a few days ago Hawaiian Electric announced mind-blowing Solar-Plus-Storage contracts.
Even though Australia is our key focus for the start of 2019, we will soon be spreading our wings internationally. We will be doing all we can to help lead the revolution!
Last but not least, I would like to thank our community for your continuous support. Our online family expanded dramatically over the past year with 36,000 followers on Twitter, 27,795 on Facebook, and a record 33,483 members in the WePower Telegram community.
Yours,
Nick
Co-founder & CEO
WePower
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