EDF is one of the world's largest electricity producers and the largest renewable energy producer in Europe, serving nearly 38 million customers worldwide. EDF's primary value to its customers includes ensuring a reliable and sustainable energy supply, while promoting energy efficiency and environmental responsibility.
EDF has positioned itself as a leader in helping customers worldwide leverage distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). Wholly-owned subsidiary Exaion provides the computing and network infrastructure necessary to roll out projects faster, with high security, as well as running a Hedera network node.
Mission
Researchers at EDF are focused on improving performance in all existing activities and preparing for the future by working on breakthrough technologies. Globally, Decentralized Energy Resources (DER) are poised to become a substantial part of the power grid and have to be addressed, including private solar panels, electric vehicles and hydrogen generation. To fully harness the potential of this evolving energy landscape, EDF is actively exploring the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to: • Ensure the secure measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of ESG data. • Ensure that ESG data is interoperable between the centralized and decentralized assets and management systems from different parts of the world. • Facilitate the creation of marketplaces that effectively coordinate various stakeholders, including smaller ones, using tokenomics to deliver unique solutions. • EDF firmly believes that this approach not only enhances transparency but also fosters innovation and the development of sustainable energy ecosystems. To achieve this mission, EDF is building projects on Hedera’s open-source ledger technology, which is designed to incentivize the use of low-emission energy sources and mitigate investment risks, ultimately enhancing the economic viability of low-emission energy. The open-source nature of these projects streamlines processes and improves accessibility to diverse end-users.
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.
Three transformative projects
EDF has three projects in development with Hedera:
Green H2 Certification and Trading
EDF aims to bring credibility and accessibility to green hydrogen, while also fostering its adoption in a sustainable energy ecosystem. This project has a dual focus: firstly, to democratize secure and transparent certification of low-carbon and renewable hydrogen at scale; and secondly, to create a marketplace to incentivize its use. This project is in collaboration with EDF subsidiaries EIFER, and Exaion - both EDF’s subsidiaries.
EV Charging with RECs
This project aims to establish a reliable and transparent system for tracking and verifying the renewable energy sources used to power EV charging infrastructure. To achieve this, the project involves fractionalizing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), which allows for a more precise alignment with the varying energy requirements of EV charging. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) ensures real-time tracking, matching, and secure issuance of RECs, which overcomes the current limitations associated with traditional REC systems. This innovative approach empowers electric vehicle owners to make environmentally conscious choices while charging their vehicles. This project is in collaboration with REDEX and Rekursive Labs.
HEDGE (HEDera Google EDF)
The "HEDGE project" was a collaboration between Hedera, Google Cloud, EDF, and startup partners (Sparklin, EmBlock). The goal was to create a secure, decentralized platform connecting small physical assets like meters, PV panels, and EV charging stations. This platform generated environmental certificates and facilitated related marketplaces, all while addressing the challenge of safely integrating data flows from objects into third-party application servers through potentially untrusted networks.
Transforming green hydrogen certification and trading
The Green hydrogen project is a pioneering initiative in the field of low-carbon and renewable hydrogen certification, which contributes directly to the goals of Hedera:
- Digitize & Open Source Methodologies by streamlining the complexities of Green H2 certification process
- Scale Validation and Verification by providing an auditable view over the entire value chain
- Enable the adoption of low-carbon Hydrogen at scale by enabling digital ownership and trade of H2 certificates to a broader range of producers, users, and investors via a global marketplace
This project stands out due to its ability to simultaneously address multiple challenges facing the hydrogen market, including transparency, environmental impact measurement, certification standards, and market fragmentation. By leveraging Hedera's decentralized ledger technology, it offers a secure and transparent platform for low-carbon and renewable hydrogen certification and trading.
While direct electrification is the preferred approach for decarbonization, EDF recognizes that certain sectors face challenges in this regard, making low-carbon hydrogen a crucial driver in achieving carbon neutrality. EDF launched in 2022 an industrial Hydrogen Plan aiming to develop 3 GW of electrolytic hydrogen projects worldwide by 2030. The overall goal is to produce 100% low-carbon hydrogen to accelerate the decarbonization of sectors where emissions are hard to abate and alternative solutions are either unavailable or difficult to implement, such as heavy industry and long-distance transport. The “Green H2 certification and trading” project is aligned with this objective to help the industry de-risk investment and improve the economic feasibility of low-emission hydrogen.
Why Hedera
Low carbon blockchain credentials
As a recognized global leader in combating climate change, EDF has undertaken to produce increasingly low-carbon electricity and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The Hedera network’s computational efficiency as a proof-of-stake decentralized public network aligns with this goal and makes it the ideal platform on which to deploy energy use cases.
Hedera Guardian provides a unique certification layer
While distributed ledger technology may solve many issues related to trust and confidence between parties in a decentralized energy system, they do not solve some issues directly related to the physical layer. For instance, the IT layer may be fooled by the introduction of synthetic data that simulate objects that do not exist. A decentralized certification layer, linked with the ledger such as Guardian therefore provides a prerequisite for reliable solutions.
Scalable, reputable ecosystem
EDF considers the quality of the consortium as important as the quality of the technology. Hedera provides both a scalable technical infrastructure with a focus on impact and a consortium of global companies, of which many are related to energy production. This enables collaboration and unity as the sustainability asset landscape continues to evolve. Hedera therefore has the potential to become the core on which to build global REC and MRV structures.
EDF is proud to work with Guardian’s ecosystem of partners:
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