Powerverse

A Blockchain-based lifecycle management platform for crowdfunding and monitoring of AI-validated local renewable energy projects (especially in developing countries and rural areas).

What is it?

• Data-driven validation mechanism - Machine Learning pipeline for generating estimates of the suitability of a certain location on the earths surface for the construction of a renewable energy system (solar/wind). On top, precise intra-hour forecasting of (local) energy demand and weather development.
• Blockchain-based cryptocurrency - “Shares” of local renewable energy projects can be bought in the form of dedicated “coins” by anyone. Legal regulations, proof of ownership and value are integrated into the tokens minting process.
• Interactive world map - Webapp, serving as U/I to investors, project managers, local energy consumers and (local) authorities.

What does it do?

• Data-driven validation mechanism - Solving renewable intermittency by smart location assessment, precise weather and energy consumption prediction and the “Law of Large Numbers” → P2, P3
• Blockchain-based cryptocurrency - Transforming local renewable energy projects into transparent and lucrative “green” investment options for investors all around the globe → P1, P2, P4
• Interactive world map - Providing a high-resolution, real-time, interactive global view (”The Powerverse”) on current renewable energy projects and energy grid infrastructure → P2, P4

Our target population is four-fold.

1. People not having access to electricity - Provide the still 759 million people without electricity (2019) with renewable energy from decentralised (local) “mini grids”. Assuming low already existing energy infrastructure, these locations will be prioritised in our short-term goals to firstly eliminate no access to electricity and simultaneously achieve quick wins towards a 100% renewable energy future, as no costly and time-consuming integration of renewables into an existing grid is necessary.
2. Electricity consumers - Referring to all current consumers of electricity, as well as future consumers of electricity in the realm of increased electrification of core industry sectors and short-distance transport. Again, crucial will be to act as fast as possible, to make sure that new renewable energy systems that are built meet the drastically increasing worldwide energy demand and can guarantee a price-competitive and reliable energy supply. In short: Providing as much consumers as possible with renewable electricity.
3. Local authorities - In the longterm: Help cities and governments renew existing power grid infrastructure (especially in developed countries) by tackling the intermittency problem of renewables, generating more “cheap” energy from renewables as a viable alternative and giving a transparent, holistic view in the form of a webapp, accessible to everyone.
4. Small investors - Providing investors from all around the world with the possibility to invest money into trustworthy “green projects” while financing solar projects, especially for communities without the means to do so on their own.

Our target population is four-fold.

1. People not having access to electricity - Provide the still 759 million people without electricity (2019) with renewable energy from decentralised (local) “mini grids”. Assuming low already existing energy infrastructure, these locations will be prioritised in our short-term goals to firstly eliminate no access to electricity and simultaneously achieve quick wins towards a 100% renewable energy future, as no costly and time-consuming integration of renewables into an existing grid is necessary.
2. Electricity consumers - Referring to all current consumers of electricity, as well as future consumers of electricity in the realm of increased electrification of core industry sectors and short-distance transport. Again, crucial will be to act as fast as possible, to make sure that new renewable energy systems that are built meet the drastically increasing worldwide energy demand and can guarantee a price-competitive and reliable energy supply. In short: Providing as much consumers as possible with renewable electricity.
3. Local authorities - In the longterm: Help cities and governments renew existing power grid infrastructure (especially in developed countries) by tackling the intermittency problem of renewables, generating more “cheap” energy from renewables as a viable alternative and giving a transparent, holistic view in the form of a webapp, accessible to everyone.
4. Small investors - Providing investors from all around the world with the possibility to invest money into trustworthy “green projects” while financing solar projects, especially for communities without the means to do so on their own.

We are at the very beginning of our journey. Hence, we have very limited current data and feedback to this specific concept. However, the following past projects might act as foundation and first intuition for what is to come:

1. Innovation project in cooperation with E.ON Future Labs
   • Time period: April-August 2021
   • Topic: Business development for the integration of end-users in the energy flexibility aggregation in Germany (details are confidential).
   • Scope:
     • More than 50 interviews with experts in the energy domain and potential users
     • 2 solution ideas incl. mock-up
2. Rural Hydro-Challenges in Latin America
   • Time period: August-December 2021
   • Topic: Applied Research - Developing an isolated renewable energy network (combination of photovoltaic systems, wind turbines and storage) for the village of Huatacondo in the middle of the Atacama desert in Chile. Including economical evaluation.
   • Scope:
     • At Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá)
     • In cooperation with the Magalhaes network
3. Distributed Ledger Technology for Public Sector Innovation
   • Time period: May-August 2020
   • Topic: Applied Research - Developing a working prototype for Blockchain-based programmable fungible and non-fungible tokens as secure way of money exchange and investment in countries with low financial inclusion (e.g. for disaster relief)
   • Scope:
     • At Technical University of Munich
     • In cooperation with fortiss
     • Final report: “DLT based CBDC payment system for promoting financial inclusion, Anti-Money-Laundering and -Corruption in developing countries”

Please see answer to the previous question.

Technical detail on the two core components of our solution described above.

Data-driven validation mechanism

Here we distinguish three core features:

• Location assessment - Optimal geographical locations and size for renewable power plants are determined based on:
  • Historical spatio-temporal weather data - including seasonal, daily, monthly, yearly variations in local solar irradiance and wind velocity
  • Energy consumption patterns
  • Use probabilistic models, e.g. deep generative models
• Precise predictions - Once solar power plant is built monitor electricity generation vs. consumption and make sure to guarantee a steady and reliable energy supply
  • Intra-hour probabilistic solar and wind forecasting with uncertainty quantification (proxy for electricity generation)
  • Use probabilistic models, e.g. NGBoost as used in this paper
• Data visualisation techniques for world map

Blockchain-based cryptocurrency

There are various design choices to consider when building a Blockchain system. Important features for our use case might include:

• Purpose-bound money - Every time a renewable energy system is built a certain amount of “legal-aware” tokens is minted.
• Proof of ownership - Physical ownership needs to be connected to a certain amount of tokens. An imaginable way might be to embed zero-knowledge proofs (e.g. ZkSNARKs) into Ethereum-based smart contracts.
• Governance - An access rights system has to be developed, specifying foremost who is allowed to change what and specifically how maintenance of the system looks like.

Remark: Of course the above points are still very high level and will have to be specified and tested respectively.

• Current number of people serving: 0
• Estimated number of people serving in the next year: 100-1000
  • See “impact goals” for further explanation

Impact Goals

• Short-term (in the next 2 yrs)
  • Prio 1 - Concentrate on constructing ASAP as many solar power plants in sub-saharan/central Africa (especially countries with lowest access to electricity, Tanzania, Niger, Chad, etc. - all posing perfect conditions with low grid infrastructure and high and reasonably stable solar irradiance) as possible, starting with Ghana, due to direct partnership between TUM.ai and KNUST CoE IC (see partners section)
  • Prio 2 - Motivate Munich/German/European (startup) ecosystem to get involved in climate change mitigation and specifically the renewal of our existing energy system.
  • Prio 3 - Gather enough crowdfunded money for decentralised renewable power systems to stop the construction of all new fossil-fuel based power plants.
• Long-term (> 2yrs)
  • Prio 1 - UN SDG 7: Provide “green” electricity to all humans on earth by extending construction of renewable energy systems (incl. wind, water power and geothermal) to the middle East and south east Asia, foremost countries with high development rates (hence also fast increasing energy needs) but still high rates of people without direct access to electricity.
  • Prio 2 - Providing industry (foremost chemical, steel and cement industry) with reliable and sufficient electricity from renewables to drive electrification and hence reduce GHG emissions in industry.
  • Prio 3 - Providing transparent and price competitive “green” energy to inhabitants in developed countries by integrating increasing amounts of electricity generated from renewables to provide sufficient incentive to update existing power grids (especially digitising and decentralising them).

Due to the early nature of this project no measurable indicators have yet been set. In the future, we will use the OKR framework for general project advancement.

Intuitive measurable indictors could be:

• Remaining number of communities without access to electricity*
• Local and global percentage of renewable energy to total energy generation*
  • As proxy: Number of newly built solar panels and wind turbines
• Number of crowd-financed renewable energy projects
• Reduction in GHG emissions and/or air pollution in specific areas and cities
• Number of daily/monthly/yearly users on our platform

*For many of these indicators crucial data is necessary that currently is only incompletely available. An important job therefore would also be to collect energy data from around the world and establish an accurate “energy tracker”, much like recent effort in tracing GHG emissions, see ClimateTrace.

As general guideline especially the UN SDGs 7 (”Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all”), 11 (”Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”) and 13 (”Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”) are and will be essential to measuring and making sure that we are still on the right track.

Theoretical challenges

• Renewable intermittency - Successfully finding a way to integrate renewable (weather-dependent) energy sources into existing energy grids and fully rely on them for reliable electricity is still a hot research topic. We believe that the issue is solvable with Machine Learning and Control Theory. A combination I (Patrick) would like to write my master’s thesis about.
• Blockchain-based crowdfunding - Guaranteeing a secure, transparent and easily maintainable distributed ledger for a functional decentralised market is also still a research problem with many different approaches. We believe that Blockchain offers us the right space for creating a fair and open energy future.

Technical challenges

• We need financial support to build an MVP and conduct a pilot together with local authorities (preferably in a developing country)
• We need more and quality data!

Legal challenges

• Trusted Blockchain - Smart contracts and NFTs for property ownership still face great “trust” issues in society. Multiple real-world proof of concepts are necessary to guarantee a secure and safe system.
• Data privacy - being a very important subject, especially in the ML community, we will have to make sure that our service and especially our algorithms are privacy-preserving (e.g. through differential privacy in ML)

We are currently a team of three master’s students with the following backgrounds:

Niko - linkedin

• Universities: Technical University of Munich, Chalmers tekniska högskola
  • Field: Management and Computer Science
• Practical experience:
  • Startup experience (Luminovo.ai, Relevo, Plug and Play)
  • Intersection of business and tech
• In project: Business perspective

Nico - linkedin

• Universities: Technical University of Munich, Imperial College London
  • Field: Data Engineering and Analytics + Electrical Engineering
• Practical Experience:
  • Management experience in the AI domain (Founder of TUM.ai)
  • Machine Learning and software development experience (Openmined, AppliedAI)
• In project: AI and Software development

Patrick - linkedin

• University: Technical University of Munich, Universidad de los Andes
  • Field: Robotics, Cognition, intelligence + Mechanical Engineering
• Practical Experience:
  • Engineering experience (Airbus, Haver&Boecker)
  • Machine Learning and Blockchain experience (fortiss, Bosch Siemens Home Appliances)
• In project: Blockchain, AI, domain expertise

All of us are in our final Master’s year at the Technical University of Munich. We will use the year 2022 to lay the theoretical foundation for the project described above and based on the outcomes try to actively start our entrepreneurial journey in the beginning of 2023. We have a strong technical background in Energy, AI and Blockchain, as well as multiple years of practical experience in the industry, management experience as heads of student initiatives.

Foremost we have dedicated ourselves to bring humanity back on track for 0 carbon emissions by 2050 and will start by decarbonising our energy sector, while increasing the quality of lives of a significant amount of people developing countries and rural areas.

As the idea is quite new, we have not yet directly reached out to partners concerning this specific concept. For our current networks, please see our LinkedIn profiles.

I am not familiar with the prize and unfortunately don't have the time anymore to look at it.

It seems that the above prize fits our use case, unfortunately same applies as with the prize above. Appologies!