Programmable Energy, 5 Token Infrastructure

It is a common pattern to hold tokens in wallets. If we want to take this to the energy sector the question becomes, where do we “land” the wallets, who will be the owner, what does a wallet represent and how can it be augmented to the current smart grid functionalities like smart meter and allocation, reconciliation, clearing and settlement processes.

When tokens represent energy, as we have seen in a previous post, that a first natural location is on the smart meter. If we consider behind the meter use cases, we will want a wallet for each asset, like heat pump and home charging wall box. Also, public chargers will have a wallet as it supplies the power to an EV. Looking at the new EV charging standard ISO 15118 where the EV is an autonomous actor on the grid negotiating with the charger the EV will have a wallet as well.?

In the wallet we can program the interaction of an asset with the tokens in the wallet, e.g. clearing and settlement when demand tokens are matched with supply tokens in a wallet instance. The design of these interactions is part of the use case development going forward.

In the diagram below this concept is depicted.

In order to support the regulation requiring each transaction party in the energy eco-system to be known, we can link the wallets to accounts. Accounts can be setup for natural persons or legal entities.

?At this time you might have formed an opinion that this whole setup is to complex for a normal citizen, to address this I expect we will have energy service provider that will take care of the setup, monitoring and control of all your wallets and tokens.

Similar to the European PSD2 regulation in Finance.

In the next post we will investigate some use cases and show how tokens can exchange based on this setup.