Zug, Switzerland: The Energy Web Foundation (EWF) and PJM Environmental Information Services, Inc. (PJM-EIS) announced a collaboration October 25 focused on developing and testing a new form of generator attribute tracking compatible with BlockChain and distributed ledger systems. The system is known as Energy Web Origin and it’s being deployed in association with the Generation Attribute Tracking System (GATS) administered by PJM-EIS.
EWF explains that GATS is a paid subscription service that creates and tracks a generator-specific electronic certificate for every megawatt-hour of electricity produced by a generator. The system tracks the environmental and emissions attributes of generation, along with the ownership of credits as they are traded or used to meet governmental renewable-energy standards.
The collaboration will focus on the PJM region of the GATS market, and aims to develop, test, and make available a full implementation of the blockchain-based EW Origin toolkit. EW Origin explains that it “helps unlock renewables investments by reducing administrative and transaction costs, modernizing user experience, and enabling greater access for renewable energy markets, including for smaller buyers and sellers below the megawatt-hour level.”
EW Origin, which runs on the Energy Web Chain, is a state-of-the-art toolkit for renewable energy markets across the globe that leverages blockchain technology to record the provenance and automatically track the ownership of renewably generated energy. EWF is developing EW Origin as an open-source toolkit for issuing bodies and registries across the globe that oversee renewable energy certificate (REC), guarantee of origin (GO), international renewable energy certificate (I-REC), and other similar green energy attribute systems.
The proponents say that applications built with the EW Origin toolkit will offer issuing bodies, registries, and market participants of any size “greater transparency, disintermediation, aggregation, interoperability, automation, and overall user experience at a lower cost compared to existing technology services.”
EWF will develop the full EW Origin toolkit for a reference implementation in collaboration with PJM-EIS between October 2018 and November 2019. EWF will also manage pilots of EW Origin in the PJM region in coordination with PJM-EIS and various key market participants to test the toolkit in real-world settings and collect feedback for improvements. PJM-EIS notes that it will advise on the development to ensure “the implementation meets business, regulatory, technological needs for issuing, trading, tracking, retiring, and reporting RECs in GATS.”
EWF’s goal with the collaboration is to demonstrate how large numbers of distributed energy assets — in the tens or hundreds of thousands — can participate in renewable energy certificate markets, operating at a price point where it is economically feasible to bring even small rooftop solar installations to these markets. EW Origin can do this by standardizing and automating processes such as physical asset registration, asset authentication through digital signatures, secure data logging, REC creation and validation, REC ownership registration, and REC retirement.
EWF will make the full EW Origin toolkit publicly available for reference and use as a template by other REC, GO, and I-REC trading and tracking systems so that application developers can build and deploy their own modernized technology services for issuing bodies, registries, and market participants across the globe. Application developers may also reference and use the EW Origin toolkit to develop electric vehicle, battery, and other energy-focused applications running on the EW Chain where enhanced traceability of energy generation provides value.
See also the related story “Company seeks to redefine energy interactions with exergy tokens” in IPPSO FACTO April 2018.
For more information see https://energyweb.org/blockchain/.