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In March, India Smart Grid Forum (ISGF) and its executive director, Reena Suri, became the first Energy Web Ambassador in India. The announcement came during India Smart Utility Week 2020. As an EW Ambassador, ISGF will play an active role in promoting EW’s ecosystem and solutions in the Indian market. ISGF and EW have already been collaborating since 2018. With this new agreement, we solidified our partnership with a defined set of objectives that aims to engage India’s largest energy players.

A common vision for the future of the nation's energy grid involves homeowners selling unused power generated from rooftop solar panels to others in their communities, and working together to help ensure the reliability, resiliency, and security of the power grid everyone uses. Sounds great in theory. But how can the grid manage such complex energy transactions at scale? Several emerging solutions to this opportunity rely on blockchain technology. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are evaluating the use of blockchain for transactive energy using hardware in the laboratory's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF)—with help from Energy Web and U.S. utilities.

Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL

We teamed up with Vodafone Business, a global technology communications company and a leader in IoT with over 100 million connections worldwide, to help improve the integration of renewable and distributed energy assets within power grids using secure IoT connectivity and blockchain technology. The partnership will combine SIM-centric blockchain technology (SCB) with IoT connectivity from Vodafone Business to create secure IDs for energy assets. This means that renewable and distributed assets like wind turbines, batteries, heat pumps, and solar panels can be integrated with energy grids safely and efficiently.

We jointly announced a strategic partnership with SunSpec—a trade alliance of roughly 100 solar and storage companies spanning Asia, Europe, and North America—to co-develop digital standards, protocols, solutions, and certifications that support ‘plug & play’ system interoperability for solar PV and battery energy storage technologies. Together we're enlisting energy market participants such as grid operators, renewable energy developers, and distributed energy resource (DER) providers for projects focused on digitalization and grid integration of DERs.

In October, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) became the newest EW member, opening the door to work together on open blockchain platforms for integrating distributed resources. Our strategic collaboration includes: 1) Drawing upon EPRI’s research and information on digitalization standards to further development of the Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS); 2) Building test applications that run on EW-DOS in an EPRI-hosted test environment; and 3) Conducting research on the benefits of open, public digital infrastructure — including blockchain tech — to support a register of distributed resources and for integration of these resources with energy markets.

IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. Energy Web became a member of the P2418.5 working group, focused on the standard for Blockchain in Energy. The standard provides an open, common, and interoperable reference framework model for distributed ledger technology (DLT) across three use cases: 1) Serve as a guideline for Blockchain DLT use cases in Electrical Power industry; 2) Create standards on reference architecture framework, including interoperability, terminology, functionality, and system interfaces for blockchain DLT applications in the energy sector by building an open protocol and technology agnostic layered framework; and 3) Evaluate and provide guidelines on scalability, performance, security, and interoperability.

In November, we joined the InterWork Alliance (IWA), a platform-neutral, nonprofit organization dedicated to creating the standards frameworks needed to increase innovation across token-enabled ecosystems. In tandem, we also joined IWA’s Sustainability Business Working Group, an issue-aligned working group focused on carbon emissions and related themes. As a member of the IWA, EW will collaborate with the organization’s global member base to set the standards for building distributed applications, including appropriate frameworks for tokenizing items of value, writing contracts over those tokens, and privacy-preserving analytics of multi-party data.

We partnered with the University of Nicosia (UNIC) to fund a PhD / doctoral studentship focused on interoperability, advancing blockchain research and implementation. The endowed studentship sits within the Distributed Ledgers Research Centre (DLRC) at UNIC’s Institute For the Future (IFF). Alongside the announcement, UNIC became the first Academic Member of Energy Web.