The future of energy is peer-to-peer: PROSUME Energy Foundation is now disclosing a new revolutionary platform to exchange electricity from renewable and fossil sources. It connects independent power producers, consumers, innovative utility companies and energy communities in a locally shared market where each peer is free to interact in a multi-tenant ecosystem.
The members of the Foundation, professionals with a strong and long-time experience in the energy sector as well as in the blockchain softwares, have developed a platform that will deal with many of today’s problems and opportunities related to the energy sharing sector like support for regulation frameworks, fair policy pricing and new energy models and opportunities, network balancing, smart payment and smart billing.
PROSUME is a blockchain-based platform that, thanks also to its own decentralized and self-regulated monitoring system, guarantees an autonomous, independent and digitized smart place that will permit users to exchange different energy sources, promoting and accelerating new energy community models.
“We strongly believe in the sharing energy model based on the peer to peer exchange system, for this reason PROSUME platform has as its main goal to be the most innovative place to develop energy communities, in order to give everyone the possibility to exchange energy in a more transparent, traceable, accessible, flexible, resilient and sustainable way” affirms Alfredo Giardina, Co-founder of PROSUME Energy Foundation.
The three pillars of PROSUME can be summarized in the symbolical “D”:
Decentralization: as any consumer can clearly see in his utility bill, the most expensive cost element about energy is referred to distribution services and taxes rather than actual energy consumption. PROSUME wants to study and develop new decentralised energy community models where “prosumers” would become the main actors.
Digitalization: the evermore-conscious consumer could help the whole energy sector to better understand how to balance energy peaks in order for its play to optimize the use of resources and promote the development of more sustainable energy policies, including the diversification of sources, etc.
Decarbonization: starting a fossil or nuclear company today is not economically convenient anymore; the companies would need several years to amortize its initial costs due to the high investments needed; furthermore, a great part of the primary sources wouldn’t be local, increasing costs even further. It is for this reason that small energy companies are trying to find alternatives by exploiting local sources, giving priority to the most sustainable and renewable ones;
“PROSUME solutions improve efficiency while reducing time and costs in managing network and energy infrastructures. We aim to combine the network and energy layer to build a blockchain-based Internet of Energy, reducing the points of failure and the need for additional hardware from its adaptability in integrating with available and installed technologies” continues Giardina.
The mission of the Foundation is to promote decentralizing power models and empower an energy community through the blockchain software technology through the implementation of peer to peer energy exchange policies targeting possible solutions for all the existing physical and legal energy framework barriers, investing in Research & Development to offer innovative hardware and IoT-devices related to smart metering, smart grid, smart billing, energy routers and devices.
PROSUME gives the opportunity to several communities to interact and subexist allowing many different applications. It works as a p2p energy exchange service in different platforms like a smart community (empowering people to participate in specific aggregator requests of energy demands, where the consumer chooses from different energy sources like green, local, fossil, or sustainable, avoiding intermediaries), energy storage/transmission exchange, electric vehicle platform, etc.
Additional functionalities will be added and upgraded to the PROSUME platform to provide services such as flexibility market operation, assets visualization across the value chain, integration of the business process in the regulatory framework, and other compatible energy apps, hardware, etc.
Several energy companies from all around Europe have already showed a keen interest in this project. PROSUME is now negotiating eight different pilot projects in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.