Blockchain for Energy (B4E) seeks to revolutionize the energy sector by offering decentralized, transparent solutions to transform the way energy is created and consumed. They achieve this by conducting collaborative, industry-level research and development to refine DLT solutions. They also provide consulting services and work with regulators and leaders across the industry to ensure a cohesive approach to system development.
Mission
Create a collaborative approach to education, platform development, standards adoption, and continuous technology iteration to drive DLT adoption across the entire energy value chain. To achieve this mission, B4E is leveraging the Hedera-based open-source Guardian platform, which provides auditable, traceable, and reproducible records documenting the emission process and lifecycle.
Carbon Project Integrity
The Guardian Ecosystem enables ALLCOT to create a standardized project development framework that fosters trust, transparency and compatibility across all project stakeholders. This ensures the creation of high-integrity projects while maximizing benefits for local communities.
The Guardian Ecosystem facilitates the fulfillment of methodology standards, validation body requirements, project developer needs, and community expectations, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency and transparency of the project
ALLCOT stakeholders benefit from access to accurate and comprehensive information on Hedera Guardian’s public ledger, leveraging a common set of rules and standards, fostering trust and accountability.
Transparently demonstrating how project resources are allocated on the public ledger enables ALLCOT’s stakeholders to comprehend the full scope of a project's efforts, flow of funds, and impact.
By recording the transaction cost at every stage of a project's progress, resulting carbon credits can be priced to maximize revenue distribution back to the local community.
By utilizing Hedera Guardian’s digital ledger, ALLCOT is able to minimize accounting errors, make auditing more open and efficient, and enable a more equitable emergence of verification and validation partners.
The Hedera Guardian Ecosystem establishes a secure chain of data custody, particularly in the case of drone-captured information for origination purposes. This enables ALLCOT to ensure that all project data remains intact, trustworthy and accurately tethered to each project attribute.
By ensuring that data provided aligns with the necessary frameworks, the Guardian helps meet specific industry needs and standards, while ensuring compliance with multiple reporting requirements.
ALLCOT is focused on creating products that surpass the limitations of conventional methods, shifting towards more advanced and efficient approaches to future sustainability markets.
The Guardian serves as a single source of truth, ensuring that policies and rules are standardized and compatible with other sustainability market actors. This enables ALLCOT to align financing through carbon forwards and the structuring of green bonds seamlessly across various entities within the ecosystem
The adoption of a common taxonomy within Guardian enables ALLCOT to establish a standardized language for discussing and addressing various sustainability issues. This fosters better communication and alignment for more effective and cohesive climate action.
By leveraging the flexibility and adaptability of Guardian, ALLCOT has the ability to provide various pathways for different stakeholders as the sustainability market evolves.
The Hedera Guardian Ecosystem operates as a common good, providing services to the entire ecosystem without an extractive fee-based model.
ALLCOT leverages the Hedera Guardian Ecosystem to build on and integrate various services and initiatives already established by other community members. This creates an aligned, streamlined ecosystem of sustainability market actors that avoids duplication to serve the needs of communities, investors, and project developers.
Building a robust energy asset ecosystem
Trust, transparency, standardization and auditability of emissions-related data are problems facing the energy industry today.
It is imperative that data associated with emissions reporting and environmental claims can be audited and the methodologies used to calculate them are open- source and transparent. This will build trust in the veracity of emissions reporting accounting assets.
Collaboration first
B4E's unique approach as an industry consortium provides a level of subject matter expertise not found in individual projects. Building collaboration between companies that traditionally might be competitors shows the understanding that the web3 world is both networked and collaborative. It's the network effect of such a large industry that will drive the adoption of DLT-based technology and digital asset standards that no one company can do on its own. The breadth of consortium membership and its value chain will provide the network effect needed to scale industry solutions.
Enabling robust data
Building on Hedera enables project data that is verifiable, auditable, standardized and decentralized. When you have robust data, you effectively decide how best to deploy resources to achieve decarbonization goals, which meets the aims of solutions being built by B4E.
Building using leading, cross-industry standards
B4E adheres to the Interwork Alliance standards for Carbon Emissions Tokens (CET). Hedera, Swirlds Labs, and the HBAR Foundation contributed to the development of these standards alongside multiple other leading DLT organizations, including Rearden Digital who advised on the development of the solution for B4E. Using these standards ensures the highest quality digital asset for B4E platform users.
Low carbon, scalable technology
B4E builds on Hedera as a DLT system that has both a low environmental impact and ability to handle a transactions-per-second rate scalable with the onboarding significant energy infrastructure. Operational costs can also be fixed on a transactions-per-second basis, ensuring the long-term economic viability of platform operations.
Case study: Emissions Management Platform
B4E is utilizing Hedera Guardian’s to support its digital MRV technology to develop the Emissions Management System.
This allows power producers and their value chains to calculate and tokenize emissions-related data, ranging from carbon to renewable energy certificates. This results in auditable and verifiable emissions reporting and the validation of environmental claims.
The first system user is a geothermal energy plant operator that will tokenize carbon emissions, carbon removal, and renewable energy certificates. A large systems provider will feed emissions-related data into the management system, leveraging pre-existing technology infrastructure.
This project represents the first ever geothermal project to utilize DLT to tokenize digital assets. Methodologies unique to geothermal are being developed with state regulators and audited by a large institution to ensure proper outcomes. This will prove the system's value proposition to enhance the financial viability of renewable energy projects and set a benchmark of how the technology improves access to capital markets, satisfies regulators, and can scale to meet future compliance needs.
This project will show the consortium member companies the benefit of using dMRV-based tokenization systems to provide impactful value to existing operations, new builds, and new renewable technology deployment in a measurable format. It will also enable technical platform development that can be utilized for different energy technologies and operators to fit their specific needs.
With the B4E consortium members at the top of the energy production industry, this will set the benchmark for the industry, the value chain, regulators, and the financial service sector, which are all key to achieving the decarbonization goals. The network effect of this initial project accelerates the adoption and standardization of the new carbon economy.
The estimated go-live date is March of 2024.
Key benefits of developing this approach include:
- High verifiability
The Emissions Management System provides verifiable, standardized data to internal stakeholders; and enables reporting to certification bodies in adherence to requirements set by the financial services industry. - Robust ownership of quality assets
On the carbon removal and renewable energy certificate side, the system produces the highest quality digital ownership of those environmental claims. This ensures that platform users maximize the validity of those claims as a flight to quality enhances demand and value for high-quality digital assets. - Open source, digitized methodologies
Alongside Emissions Management System requirements, Guardian manages the open source digital methodologies workflows of the assets that are minted. The energy industry relies on hundreds of different methodologies to calculate environmental outcomes. As B4E iterates the platform, automation of methodology digitization will overcome barriers to energy asset scalability. - Risk reduction
Emissions Management System protocols allow platform users to ensure that missing data or anomalies are identified and suggest fixes to comply with the standards. This removes the rigorous process of platform users manually auditing data and running the risk of minting non-compliant digital assets.