Energy communities building a Solarpunk future / Thomas Zeinzinger, Peter Grassberger

Transcript

foreign [Music] [Applause] hi everyone we are Peter and I we tell you a little bit about the Practical problems you're actually facing if you're uh trying to make a solo Punk future uh really to real life and we have a small side project usually we're working on a on a crypto wallet called Minerva and we have seven energy which is doing

basically accounting for real-life energy communities and we think about how to make energy communities a really important part of getting a solo Punk future which we all desire so much um but before I get into how we what we're working on I want to say a couple of words what is an energy Community uh because uh you need to know how the energy space is actually uh regulated so it's very kind of densely regulated you can't do much you can't sell to your neighbor you can't sell energy to somebody you want to and we are now

getting a more decentralized kind of system so we're having more and more self-production on houses and so on but usually in summer you have so much production from your house which you can't kind of use yourself and which you need to get to somebody else but uh right now the whole system is completely centralized now it's kind of reshaping and that's kind of causing friction of course with the incumbents which are out there the incumbents have no intention to give away to us trading energy directly so I have to say that I'm kind of really happy that actually the European Union

made a framework where every European country needs to implement something which is called an energy community so there are two ways of energy communities a renewable energy community and the citizen energy community and uh they actually structured it in a way that uh big corporations can't easily take over those energy communities those energy communities are meant to be a kind of a Association or a Cooperative of kind of uh people which are close to each other and big corporations can't kind of take over because the kind of governance needs to stay within that community so

that's already kind of in the expected how the Nations actually Implement that kind of Regulation from the European level so different countries are in different kind of um how can it say implementation stages Austria is quite far ahead although every European nation should actually have already the regulation in place to allow energy communities I think there are like three or four who've done it so they should have had it last year so if you're from one European Union country so you should press your government if you don't have that

regulation yet in place but that's also a reason why we think that it's a good place to kind of prototype some kind of system in Austria where we already have the regulation for it um so you probably know that uh that we all strive for uh climate neutrality uh by 2015 European Union but Austria is also a little bit more ambitious once you have electricity 2030 completely from Renewables and 240 completely energy uh carbon neutrality coming back to the headline so saying we are looking for a solo Punk future so what's Solo Punk future and you what you

often see is this kind of pictures out there and I would like to uh to go back to yesterday's talks or recommend you to go back to yesterday's talks there was Martin talking about sustainable architecture and that was really kind of a very good framework but he presented and what actually is needed for urbanized kind of system how we get there to have more Greenery in the in the cities what we have to have a more livable place to have everything around us that we don't have to commute so much and so on of course we see some implementations which go in the direction of maybe

that so this is Singapore this is more like a recreational space so I would not say okay we all live there and it all looks like this in the future but uh I kind of like that kind of Direction it's taking so there is more awareness to build things which are appealing and noise to look at so uh and and nice to walk through um why is energy important I think this is the fundamental kind of misconception we are very often discussing about should we do this and should we do that we should be clear that everything around us everything

what we do right now is based on fossil fuels so we just kind of recently started harvesting energy from Sun from winds and a couple of other sources so this is still reflected in the amount what we consume in fossil fuels so if you look at this one this is the current primary energy consumption you just see the kind of magnitude what we need to change how we need to get to a point where all these kind of small pieces there on on that chart on the pie chart is actually growing tremendously and we see only major growth in wind and solar

actually so nuclear is more or less still sending and yeah and uh and water is kind of kind of used quite extensively already in many parts so wind and soul is the one which actually has to uh to win and the other thing is of course reduce energy consumption in various places so transport is one houses housing is another one where you have a lot of fuel fossil fuel consumption so when we talk about energy communities and when we say okay what kind of problem in real life so intersection with people and you should imagine if you're talking to energy Community you

are having mostly older people non-trypto people they have no in interest in speculation you can't catch them with nfts there is just no way to get them interested in all that kind of stuff so but of course the regulation itself as well as the governments they uh they want to incentivize these energy communities and the energy communities they should have some kind of financial benefits out of it if you look at the Austrian situation in Austria actually you have um you have about 50 to 100 euros what the household can

save being part of an energy community if you have a small energy Community let's say you're starting you're kind of uh kind of finding a couple of people around you and you're starting and you're building an association very easily uh the banking fees actually cost you more than basically what you can save and that kind of brought us to these kind of idea okay why not just solve this very tiny problem of doing accounting on the blockchain using a blockchain token using a stable coin in that kind of system and move all the other bits and pieces outside so we are

having that kind of regulatory uh needs that we have to do an official organization within the country so we have a Association so people need to come to something which is kind of an official organization and then we build another thing which we call Seven energy Dao which is basically you're kind of opting in into this style where you get shares and where you also contribute something but Peter will tell you more about that one and of course the members they need a wallet and they need to join this Association and then there is this other kind of

thing somewhere you need to get the data for the accounting and then you do the accounting and that basically is doing a direct directly um deductions from wallets in that seven energy dial so um because you see more of that in in a bit this is the current Uh current website so everything is in German because as I said so we're we're doing this kind of prototype in Austria so energy communities without banks and it's meant to be a so-called citizen energy communities so cities and energy

Community doesn't have kind of any kind of constraint how close participants in that energy Community are uh so we have a little bit more flexibility that we can select people further apart taking part in that energy Community we did this proof of concept for the Dao what you see at least on on the surface in a bit and of course you can check out the the GitHub as well and we're preparing the association uh for it and and prepare it so now Peter will tell you a little bit more about the the Dow itself

okay so I'm going to walk you through our Dow that we built so this is the the interface when you load it up so users that we want to onboard they they didn't don't know about wallets but you know of course so there's metamask or injected wallets and there's also wallet connect which is really important to us so that it also works with our our wallet that's a mobile wallet and yeah let's uh look at the onboarding flow so you can see on top there's a wallet connected there and there's four steps first step is to become a member of the

Dao so that's the on-chain workflow um more about that right now but um step two is to to become part of this Association that we need is a legal requirement um so this is um like off chain uh signing some documents and becoming part of that Association and uh point three is to actually activate this data flow so we need some data from the household like how much any energy was consumed or how much energy was provided to the to the energy community so we also need to activate that and step four is to to

then profit from from this dial going back to Step One um so users are are like if you have energy utility bills you're used to like bank accounts where where funds are collected from the bank account and we want to do something similar here so the user has to have some token we're on coven here so it's some fake die that we use here and you need to have some of those and you need to set an allowance so funds can be pulled from your account and there's there also needs to be um some some like entry fee that you

need to provide when you join as a kind of safety so um if you run out of funds in your wallet um it takes some time to maybe stop you so stop the the accounting uh in the real world so um we have this entrance fee as a kind of safety that we can work with when you have an empty wallet suddenly so if you join this town you see this screen here so this is your membership and you can see your balance in your account so so in this case 900 F die and next to it you can see your allowance so

the allowance that you set we can retract from from your wallet and for the fee that you pay when you enter the Dow you get some shares in the down so it says here you have 100 shares and on top you can see so it's two members in this now so you have like 50 percent of the shares and you can of course change your allowance with this field here and the next section is the list of members so in this one I already said it it's two members in the Tao members can um like net consume energy or more

consume than provide and there can also be members that provide more energy so they have like solar panels on the roof and they will provide and we will do the the accounting so we measure um what's happening and then we we shift balances so we say okay we retract some some f die and we distribute it again among the members and you can also decide to like stock up on on shares and also lower your your shares to a certain minimum and the last option is of course to to leave the Dao if you decide that you don't want to be a member anymore

okay so um everything basically is based on a wallet so we're uh we have been working a couple of years now on the mineral wallets and although you see here a couple of screens um and we think it's a fairly simple to use wallets um what we also kind of think that basically taking the the people which are part of an energy Community they will need a much more simplified beginner's wallet we think it is mobile we are currently working on the design for it but if you don't make it super super simple this use case will never

fly and uh I don't believe in kind of you know it's like we can do all these kind of virtual things and we're doing all these kind of trading and and having nft drops and we made some air streams we put token and mid and streamable everything noise everything great for a certain Community if you're talking about uh things like energy communities it has to be super simple very easy for everybody to understand and all these kind of complexity what we're doing has to be abstracted away they need to get in they need to get out they need to handle their token they should not care about gas payments all these kind of

things they have to become and only then I think things like uh solo punks can change the world in my opinion thank you very much foreign [Applause] absolutely love it does anyone in the quest in the audience have any questions ah we've got two questions here who get ah there's the microphone is closer you win fairly simple one uh how do you help people on board to get their first X die or uh like turn how do they come in first when they don't have any crypto or anything to do help them or

yeah especially now in this kind of very early stage of it uh we we helped them we also don't have this kind of super simple wallets but of course designing the super simple wallet already takes into consideration what would people need for real life use cases in in our case we think that the wallet should kind of this kind of simple wallet should basically lead you right in the in the very first purchase of some Europe stabilized token so that you are not thinking about any kind of other token the first thing you get is a in our case we think of J Euro so Jarvis is having a euro-based token so I think

there uh it would be the first step and then basically helping on but uh but right now we probably have to help everyone onboarding except they're already part of crypto okay and I'm afraid we're up for time so no more questions for that but thank you very much for coming and talking to us Peter and Thomas [Applause]