Blockchain

Title: {Tracking renewable energy 24/7 with open-source blockchain solutions}

Duration: {19 :46} minutes

Description:

{How can we track green energy consumption around the clock?}

{To answer this question, Energy Web and Shell’s Blockchain team completed a proof of concept to track renewable energy 24/7 using Blockchain Technology. They tested and demonstrated how blockchain can support customers’ changing needs and increase transparency on renewable electricity consumption. Join this session for a showcase of a granular matching of renewable energy supply and demand in a trusted way. Using Energy Web’s open-source digital infrastructure, including the Energy Web Chain, this solution complements existing certification schemes. Helping to build openness and trust in the technologies that will enable rapid shifts in our current energy systems. AI for Good presenters will reflect on the role blockchain can play as a complementary building block in a future decarbonized energy system enabled by artificial intelligence.}

{Tracking renewable energy 24/7 with open-source blockchain solutions} Transcript

[No Background music]

[Text displays]

{AI for Good Perspectives. Experts Insights, Global Visions, Shared Solutions}

{Opening and introductions}

[Chris Bockman]

{Journalist}

[Natasa Marangou]

{Blockchain Product Manager, Blockchain CoE, Projects & Technology -Digitalization, Shell}

[Meerim Ruslanova]

{Senior Delivery Lead, Renewable Energy Traceability, Energy Web}

[Chris Bockman on screen]

{Chris Bockman}

{good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are welcome to AI for good I'm Chris Bockman presenting AI for good perspectives all year always online so AI for good is a year-round digital platform where AI innovators and problem owners learn build and connect to identify practical AI solutions to advance the UN's sustainable development goals. AI for good perspectives offers expert insights global visions and shared solutions from the AI for good community and that's why today I’m delighted to bring you two ladies one of them is Natasa Marangou blockchain product manager for energy transition at Shell and Meerim Ruslanova senior delivery lead traceability at Energy Web. Hello to both of you.}

[all speakers on screen]

{Natasa Marangou}

{hello}

{Meerim Ruslanova}

{hi chris thanks for having us}

{Chris Bockman}

{so Natasa you start first no it's a long title what do you do?}

{Natasa Marangou}

{Hi thanks for having me here today, Chris. First, um product manager at Shell I’m part of a small blockchain team at Shell a dedicated team under our innovation R&D branch that is tasked with accelerating the adoption of blockchain technology at Shell and the wider energy industry and an example of that is traceability of the origin of green energy which is of course what we're talking about today}

{Chris Bockman}

{Great and Meerim tell us a little bit about Energy Web?}

{Meerim Ruslanova}

{um yeah thanks chris um hi everyone I have the pleasure today to represent. Energy Web Foundation a non-profit developing publicly accessible blockchain tools for the energy sector

I'm personally responsible for helping energy players like Shell and our other members implement the software solutions within the specific use case of renewable energy traceability and help build applications running on the blockchain}

{Chris Bockman}

{Okay well why don't we start with you? Then so tell me you know we know a lot about blockchains but in the energy system you know what's the what's the role and um has it reached maturity?}

{Meerim Ruslanova}

{This was a core question what is the role of blockchain in the energy system five years ago when we just created our Foundation and at the time we analyzed over 150 use cases out of those um there were two major ones where we strongly believe blockchain brings additional value one is integrating distributed energy resources like batteries your solar panels EVs into the grid and renewable energy traceability so within the traceability blockchain is great because um it enables verifiable tracking of energy at the entire lifecycle and includes these different stakeholders that today don't really have a shared data platform so this is why within the traceability domain blockchain is actually reaching its maturity}

{Chris Bockman}

{Great so at Shell, what does the blockchain mean for you and you as well i guess is essential in terms of maturity?}

{Natasa Marangou}

{thanks to this indeed our blockchain team also exists since 2017 we also started looking very broadly around possible use cases that we could bring within the energy industry our focus now is really on supply chains and the energy transition where we really see blockchain technology as this neutral industry-wide infrastructure that can enable trusted and seamless exchange of information between supply chain parties now if we look at blockchain technology specifically in the energy transition um we think there's two ways we can accelerate that and that i think reflects also a little bit what Meerim referred to earlier um first of all we can make it possible to track sustainable energy and certificates from the origin through every stage and transaction so we can provide an additional layer of certainty and trust to our customers that the electricity or the hydrogen they are purchasing is really actually from renewable sources the second way that we think blockchain can play a role in the energy transition in addition to being a source of trust is that it's got the potential to transform the way that parties interact across the value chain and we are moving now to a system where we see a lot more decentralized energy resources coming connecting to the grid

blockchain is one of those technologies we think that can bring a more direct engagement between energy producers or consumers now and consumers.}

{Chris Bockman}

{Great, Meerim um if you can take over and tell us as well and what's the link with Shell sure just to build on top of what Natasa has mentioned?}

{Meerim Ruslanova}

{We at Energy Web um truly believe and we're convinced that decentralized tech like blockchain um is really fit for the job to incorporate all these millions and millions and millions of devices that we're seeing enter the energy sector as well as different users and have this trust this audit trail to incentivize clean energy consumption and reward this type of behavior when it comes to the link with Shell um Shell has been a long-standing partner with the for Energy Web for since at the very beginning basically and we um as a core mission we really depend on the power of crowd innovation where Shell is taking a really active participation too so for example for this specific project on renewable energy traceability we used an already existing tool that we we've been working before and cooperated with Shell to build on top and bring the solution into life.}

{Chris Bockman}

{thank you so um maybe you can pick up here um Natasa. What's important as we talk about renewable as we talk about the environmental impact um it's the proof of concept?}

{Natasa Marangou}

{Great question what we see today is that energy consumers are starting to consider the environmental impact of their electricity consumption many of them pledging to be 100 renewable now under the current system the way companies can do that is look at their consumption on a monthly or even an annual basis and by the equivalent number of green certificates but this does not guarantee that there is enough green electricity at the exact times when these companies consume energy so there's two major implications from this kind of setup one is that this doesn't provide an accurate carbon footprint of the company the second big implication of this temporal mismatch is that there's no accurate price signals for clean energy producers so at Shell we're convinced that the current system should and will evolve eventually to address this by moving towards power granularity and we want to be able to help our customers prepare for this future and by providing insights to our customers about their true electricity consumption at any moment this proof of concept helps to start a conversation on how to achieve real decarbonization.}

{Chris Bockman}

{Meerim, tell me a little bit about um what you're doing and again your side as well and how you get into the proof of concept or what we call POC?}

{Meerim Ruslanova is sharing a screen where we see a dashboard showing various metrics of electricity consumptions She is commenting on the content of the dashboard}

{on screen, we see various metrics of electricity consumptions of an industrial facility, such as time, date, total electricity consumption for a day, consumer profile, preferred generation assets, Supplier and agreement number}

{Meerim Ruslanova}

{All right um so recognizing this growing need for matching Energy Web and Shell partnered together in this first proof of concept um to test the technical and business visibility of the of blockchain in the 24 7 use case and I’m going to be referring to 24 7 a lot so let's establish that 24 7 means tracking renewable energy in a granular level so in this first proof of concept we decided to include several participants in the Netherlands to build digital platform running on the blockchain or energy web chain that includes five major steps first one is registration of generators and consumers and anchoring their identities on the blockchain second is actually collecting the consumption and generation data and for the for this proof of concept we used historical data for three months once the data was actually collected we stamped it with a with the origin information and attributes and have this audit trail on the blockchain to ensure that we can track the entire life cycle of every energy unit here after this step there is a matching of consumption and generation and for this proof of concept we used a 30 minute interval which was the minimum interval available for the use case and after the matching all the users of the platform were able to see their performance and specifically for energy consumers they are able to see how green they are around the clock they're also able to see at what times they're not using green energy and instead are relying on the grid or the grey energy because this is a proof of concept we have to start with um with a small scope and because this use case is quite niche and new there are no established regulations for the 24 7 renewable energy tracking therefore the platform itself does not have an integration with the um with established tracking systems however this would definitely be one of the focuses in the further stages I would like to jump into a quick demo of the most important parts of the proof of content so i won't be showing everything but rather the most important functionalities when it comes to the consumer or the end like the energy user so right now we're looking at the login page where we can input our credentials as a consumer and let's imagine that we are a large industrial company with a factory in the Netherlands and we have access to this type of a tool so when we come to this view what we're seeing at the top is information about our factory because the meter number the address where it's located who the supplier is and in this case it's Shell energy and the my interesting information here is what is the target for us when it comes to sourcing carbon free energy per 30 minutes so in our case it's a little lower than 4 000 kilowatt hours another important piece of information is what are the favorite generators in our generation next so where from do we want to where do we want to source the energy from and in the case of consumers we have three solar farms in a wind farm as our preferred generation asset.}

{Natasa Marangou}

{Just to mention here that we have used um real production data for this proof of concepts this is not dummy data, but it is of course anonymized so the information you see here is not the actual reality in terms of addresses et cetera.}

{Meerim Ruslanova}

{That's a that's a great addition to that so thanks um and for example for the proof of concept we assume that the consumer chose solar panels that are closest to their factory for the highest efficiency and that's what guided the choice for the preferred assets um so to understand how green we are around the clock we can also change the time frame here as i mentioned before for the POC we actually used um three months so starting from April and finishing in June but um for now let's look at one day at a time to understand what was happening with our consumption so to do that we're looking at the consumer profile in this part of the page and what this essentially shows us is what is our consumption in total per 30 minutes on the first May of 2021 and what where the consumption is coming from so grey bars indicate the grid or Green electricity mix the blue one is from wind farm and the shades of orange are from the solar panels and as expected at night and in the early hours of the day there is no solar there is no sun so hence there is no solar generation and the majority of the energy is coming from the grid so it we're using grey electricity whose origin cannot trace then when once the sun is rising we're seeing um inclusion of the solar energy and in this case for example the majority is coming from the solar form m um and again towards the end of the day we're seeing again the pattern repeat with the grid and wind energy being more prevalent and here on the horizontal line we see our target so how much green energy or carbon free energy we want to source per times in the day we're actually not meeting this target. Now if we wanted to look at a bigger time frame so let's say we want to look at them in at one month um we see the pattern pretty much appearing here where during the days we have the peaks of solar energy specifically from solar form m and closer to the night we have we have wind farm coming in and we also see the pattern of us using more grid energy as compared to the carbon free energy um and i know this view seems a little bit congested because there's a lot of data points on this graph so we can actually increase the interval to daily to see how the performance looks on the daily interval so when we look back at the um at the right hand side of the tool we're also seeing the summary performance for the month and what we see here is that 63 of our energy is actually coming from the grid and the rest um so 21 from the wind farm eleven from solar farm m and six percent from the other two solar farms and we can see the statistics for our entire energy consumption underneath.

So what can you do with this information why does it even matter so with a tool like that you're really able to dissect where the energy is coming from and you you're seeing a more accurate carbon footprint of your energy consumption so you really know what is the shade of your energy consumption that's one two you can actually act on this information so for instance if we look at the daily pattern here we see that there's a lot more reliance on the grid in the later times of the day so maybe it makes sense to throw in another generation acid into the mix for example like a biomass producer it might make sense to invest in a storage facility and so with this type of information you as an energy consumer can act and be more sustainable not just on paper but in the reality.}

[Meerim Ruslanova stops sharing her screen. All speakers are back on screen]

{Chris Bockman}
{thanks Meerim I’m because it's AI for good in the ITU the crucial question is this is all open sourcing?}

{Meerim Ruslanova}

{the underlying technology used for the proof of concept relies on a toolkit that's publicly available so any company interested in a 24 7 toolkit can use it build on top of it um and couple it with other tools like AI. The blockchain itself also public.}

{Chris Bockman}

{So over to you Natasa um you've just seen from that experiment we saw on screen um tell me about the collaboration and of course what AI must play in all this?}

{Natasa Marangou}

{Sure. Thanks that's a that's an excellent question what comes next for us um is finding a customer that wants to pilot with us so that we can get to the next stages of this solution and with a big focus on data automation data integration and synchronization actually with the with the wider energy system we're looking also at the option of certifying the origin of green hydrogen production on the blockchain using the same solution um and your question on AI and how can that actually now complement what we're doing i think that's an excellent question because what we've done so far is really a very small first step to provide those trusted insights now that we know we can act on those insights and i think this is where AI can really play a very important role on the consumption side i think we could see us using AI to identify those structural gaps in the temporal mismatch to inform procurement strategies or enable or activate if you will demand low shifting etc. but also on the supply side we can use AI to perform decisions on how to get to 100 green energy for better temporal spatial matching um where do we build what assets what clean energy types to be able to deliver the energy where it's needed at the time it's needed but also looking at the wider energy system level AI will allow us to better integrate and utilize decentralized energy resources optimizing grip balancing services dispatching surplus storage just to name a few of the opportunities so really ultimately here is about energy optimization and orchestration at large scale and that's where blockchain can really benefit from AI to provide that optimization.}

[Chris Bockman on screen]

{Chris Bockman}

{Gread so Natasa Marangou the blockchain product manager over at Shell and Meerim Ruslanova with energy web both of you talking about block chains AI and how it can help with the energy transition and of course the UN’s goals of getting towards the sustainable development goals and of course open sourcing for all this early days fascinating discussion we'll hear much more about this of course in the coming months so I’m Chris Bockman thank you for that interesting discussion stay tuned we have much more from AI for good all year and of course always online see you soon you}

{logo of the International Telecommunication Union appears on screen and fades away}