The Electrify Story

It has been a little over two years since we founded Electrify and a year since we concluded our token launch. It’s a blistering journey it has been, and there seems to be no sign of things slowing down.

From the beginning, we had a vision for a dynamic energy future that would be more democratic and accessible to consumers, driven by technology and innovation. In the last two years, we have advanced that vision by delivering Southeast Asia’s first retail electricity marketplace. Then we raised the ante and designed Synergy, the first city grid-scale P2P energy trading platform in Asia. One of just a few such platforms in the world, we successfully deployed a pilot test of the Synergy platform in Singapore. Along the way, we secured a strategic energy partner in TEPCO, Japan’s largest electricity company and fourth largest power company in the world.

Not bad for a startup just over two years old. Now, what’s next?

Where we are today

In the coming year, we will partner with one of the largest generation companies in Singapore to commercialise Synergy. Additionally, we are also actively engaging with power companies and energy stakeholders across the Asia Pacific for more partnerships beyond just P2P energy trading; enquiries have come from as far as Europe and South America. Globally, we are one in a handful of platforms that have delivered a pilot of citywide P2P energy trading solution successfully.

Recently, on a government-supported business mission to Australia, I was surprised to learn about the size and scale of the opportunities present. My meetings with different agencies have led to further discussions around deploying Synergy as an underlying transactive energy layer. This will help to deliver more value to Australian consumers with solar PV and grid-level battery storage across multiple states.

A Glimpse into Tomorrow

2019 and the years to follow are set to be incredibly dynamic for us at Electrify. We have spent the last year re-imagining what the energy landscape of the future could look like and now, we are delivering that new reality. This new operating environment leads us into a conversation about our leadership strategy.

Julius will be taking on the newly-created role of Chief Strategy Officer while focusing his technical expertise on overseas expansion. As cities around the world face ever-growing pressure to deploy more sustainable energy assets, this new position will act as Electrify’s eyes and ears on the horizon to identify new opportunities and solutions with our platforms.

I will be taking on the role of CEO to guide the company during the execution and scaling phase. These responsibilities will include navigating the company through the various operational and regulatory requirements around energy and blockchain as we deploy in different jurisdictions. As a company, we have always believed in the power of collaboration and our new IoT architecture offers us the opportunity to bring on the expertise of new hardware and big data partners.

We have hit virtually all of our milestones, and now, we are well-placed to set new ones. It has been a fantastic journey so far, and we have a long way ahead of us. Thank you for joining us on this journey, and I look forward to bringing you more great updates in the months ahead.

Electrify: The Next Charge was originally published in Electrify.Asia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

21 May 2018

ELECTRIFY — Southeast Asia’s first electricity marketplace — was founded in March 2017 by two senior executives from the electricity industry: Julius Tan and Martin Lim. This marketplace makes it faster and easier for both business and residential consumers to compare, select and transact electricity contracts through greater transparency and astute use of internet and e-commerce technologies.

In the past 12 months, we had transacted over 60GWh of electricity, representing a GMV of over S$10M, through our cloud-based platform.

At second half 2017, we started scoping growth plans and a radical upgrade of our platform through the use of blockchain. We embarked on an ambitious project to take complex electricity contracts and execute them on the Ethereum blockchain through the use of smart contracts, on a framework called Marketplace 2.0. Subsequently, we designed a scalable peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading platform, called Synergy, that would operate across a nation-wide main grid enabled by our own IoT infrastructure, the PowerPod.

We launched an ICO to fund this endeavour, which to date is one of most successful fundraisers in Singapore.

The ICO

The ELECTRIFY token is the ELEC which will be used to settle usage fees on our network. During the ICO, we established a hardcap of $30M; there was significant buy pressure, and we were over-subscribed at $1.3B. The crowdsale was designed with an allocation of $10M to incentivise community involvement and keep significant liquidity in the secondary market.

On 23 February 2018 we held our crowdsale in a controlled distribution format and successfully closed it within 10 hours, at a price of $0.08 per ELEC, with no bonuses paid out at either pre- or mainsale.

PROGRESS

In the last six months, since ELECTRIFY started on the ICO journey and began scoping for the new blockchain platform, we have had great support from both the blockchain and energy communities.

Jun Hasegawa, CEO of OmiseGo, and Wendell Davis, both key members of the Ethereum Community joined our board of advisors, which already included data scientists and energy researchers. Jeffrey Char, head of TEPCO Corporate Ventures, also joined our advisory board and provided us critical insights into the confluence of blockchain, energy utility and investments.

To date we have inked an early MOU with TEPCO, Japan’s largest power operator and fourth largest energy company in the world, to test and explore channels to deploy our energy solutions in Japan.

We have also been invited into discussions with some state grid operators in the APAC region for evaluation of our P2P energy trading solution. Among the interested collaborators are regional solar project developers, energy storage partners and companies with an interest in renewable energy attributes.

We’ve even signed an MOU with the region’s premier solar research facility, the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS), to research and develop a tracking and settlement framework for renewable energy.

And pending paperwork is an MOU to explore how we can contribute to a greater SmartGrid solution with one of the world’s largest energy storage companies; that’s worthy of another Medium post all by itself.

SIX MONTHS IN THE FUTURE

ELECTRIFY is progressing well, keeping to the schedule of our ICO roadmap. We’ve already produced our first MVP of the PowerPod IoT framework, with a functioning sensor hub and data-visualisation dashboard. We’ve already got a collaboration with Streamr to explore the ability for end-users to monetise the data they own. Within the next few weeks, we’re going to enhance it with more live data and analyses.

We’ve started work on Marketplace 2.0, beginning with an updated UX/UI that will provide higher value for our retail electricity partners. One of the largest power companies in Singapore has already signed an agreement with us to develop smart contracts for their energy plans, and this will form the foundation for a new marketplace model. Heavily data-driven, this new marketplace will also include new AI modules to be jointly developed with a seasoned AI developer, SNAP Innovations, to deliver higher value to our partner and consumers.

Development of our blockchain is also being scoped with the architecture to be designed in the months to come. Working closely with the OmiseGo team, we’re looking to deploy this platform in tandem with the development of their network built on the Plasma scalability protocol and their ewallet SDK.

However, the most significant value we’re bringing to the table will be the deployment of the several proofs-of-concept for Synergy, our scalable P2P energy trading platform, in collaboration with several energy partners in Japan and Australia. Currently, we are selecting the appropriate solar assets to deploy PowerPod with as well as a select pool of commercial consumers to carry out the energy offtake and settlement.

ELECTRIFY is gaining significant traction in the regional energy space, with excellent progress along our developmental roadmap and a considerable number of projects in our pipeline.

We are already in discussions with some energy partners around the region to develop deeper business synergies and create more dynamic and scalable use cases.

BACKGROUND

Marketplace 2.0 — This will be among the world’s first electricity marketplaces on blockchain, allowing for more efficient transactions and greater transparencies through the use of smart contracts, to develop a blockchain infrastructure for energy transactions on a large scale.

Synergy — We’re not the earliest to the P2P energy trading space, but we are one of the very few in the world developing a working framework for scalable P2P energy trading across a main grid. The potential for affecting massive urban populations around the world cannot be ignored and is a significant gamechanger in the global energy space, with profound ramifications in the distributed energy resources (DER) sector impacting renewable energy.

PowerPod — Fundamental to both platforms is the ability to accurately gather and analyse data. The PowerPod started out as a simple IoT device that has now evolved into an IoT hub with a customisable data-visualisation dashboard. This too has long-term highly-scalable applications in the field of wide-scale data acquisition, allowing many different types of sensors to be deployed at relatively low cost.

A Power Update was originally published in Electrify.Asia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In development since late-2017, the PowerPod represents a steady and controllable conduit to report and collect data over a large scale from both energy producers and consumers. With a form factor smaller than a paperback novel, we’ve crammed in a device that is capable of capturing data from smart meters through a variety of protocols. Beyond this basic function, it will also be future-ready with input options for a variety of different sensors, from motion to temperature to humidity; essentially, if there’s a sensor out there the PowerPod can be its hub.

But beyond a mere hub, the PowerPod also communicates with the world at large through a host of protocols and standards, including Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), 3G/4G, 802.11, Ethernet and a variety of RF bandwidths. Essentially, we’re building this device to operate and talk to the Internet in as many deployable scenarios as we can imagine. All the better to collect energy production data. The various connectivity options prevents a single point of failure of one connectivity option from impacting the streaming of real time data from the PowerPod. MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), a machine-to-machine (M2M)/”Internet of Things” connectivity protocol has been chosen for message transport due to its extremely lightweight publish/subscribe method and Qos (Quality of Service) guarantee.

Imagine if you will, when we have the PowerPod deployed enmasse. We will have the makings of a widespread network of data hubs, ready to be deployed to collect even more data, depending on the exercise. Future IoT and big data applications could be in the form of environmental data such as CO2, temperature and humidity data for instance, to track the spread of disease-bearing mosquitoes. Or granular energy consumption data to help a consumer plan and track what his appliances are consuming and help reduce his consumption and spending. The applications are wide and it all starts with energy.

The Visualisation Dashboard

Data, in and of itself, is worth very little without an information dashboard to present and visualize it. In the last few months, beyond deploying and testing several iterations of the PowerPod, we’ve also been designing and testing the dashboard for the PowerPod. Taking input from some business partners, we’ve designed the dashboard to provide an overview of the data captured, mapped against national wholesale electricity prices and national consumption.

A modular design approach has been utilised in the Data push Architecture in order to ensure that it is future proof. Data is preformatted according to the analytical and visualisation tool(s) that this data will be sent to and the data is pushed real time. A QOS mechanism has also been developed in order to ensure that the data has reached its end point successfully.

This framework underlies the understanding of the difference between amount of energy generated by a DER and the prices offered and demanded by the market. It is with this clarity that we can build and deploy Synergy, our P2P energy trading platform.

Where do we go from here?

The evolution of the PowerPod hardware is a constant tide of testing and improvement. We’re also assessing different hardware platforms and different means of integrating to existing architectures that include smart meters, inverters and the new developments in solid state smart inverters.

The dashboard itself is also in constant evolution; we are utilising Agile as our development framework to support constant improvements and rapid prototyping. Future deployments include more granular presentations of information and deployment according to the needs of other partners. One other feature we’re adding will be the presentation of renewable energy certificates (REC) within the data visualisation framework.

Who wants to use the PowerPod?

Yes, this is the part that most of the members of our Tribe are waiting for; who else is going to use the PowerPod? Who else are we playing with? What are the uses?

At this early stage, we’re still very much in the zone of MVPs and POCs. But we’ve managed to get the attention of some very significant players in the energy space. Until the ink has dried on some of these agreements, we’re embargoed from speaking about them out loud, but we can share a little about the kind of scope we’re designing.

In Australia, we’re in discussions with a large European energy company to carry out a P2P trading test with a small tranche of energy from one of their solar farms. Together with this deal, we hope to design a cross border trading platform for RECs that will allow them to impact their regional clients.

You already know about our MOU with TEPCO, but we’re also in talks with a couple of other energy players there for deployment of some of our solutions. Namely a retailer in the south of Japan with their own solar generation assets wants to deploy a POC with our PowerPods track and carry out settlement; another interested party is a solar aggregator thats looking to find a more efficient solution to tracking and transacting on his power consumption.

In Singapore we’re in talks with the regulators and the central intermediary over access to the smart meters. In discussion is a test project to connect, capture and report on a small number of smart meters across Singapore.

We’re also in discussion with a regional solar developer to deploy PowerPod as part of a mechanism to not just track energy exported from their solar PV installations, but to provide the mechanism to track and transact the RECs their facilities produce.

A few weeks ago, we announced a collaboration with Streamr. Here are a couple of screenshots from that exercise:

The Streamr Canvas displays 2 different streams of real time data graphically. Data is captured from 2 separate PowerPods, where blue represents a consumer’s PowerPod — and the Real time Electricity Consumption — and black represents a producer’s Real time Electricity Production.

We’re really excited at the future possibilities of this collaboration as we start to make more data available.

Public announcements of commercial deals are often embargoed until they’ve been given the greenlight by a board of directors. So rest assured, announcements will be made in the coming weeks once the ink is dry on these agreements.

I look forward to hearing your comments; reach out to my team, and me, at our Telegram channel.

The Martinator

Electrify’s eyes and ears. was originally published in Electrify.Asia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.