At ZebPay, we’re fans of the phrase ‘Blockchain the world’. Last week, we published a blog post about how Chainlink can use blockchain to bring better crop insurance to India’s farmers. Earlier, we wrote about how digital currency helped a Kenyan village to survive the coronavirus pandemic.
The next frontier in the blockchain takeover? Climate change.
Climate change is one of the most urgent issues of our time, and now, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has launched a token to help combat it. Efforce (WOZX) aims to tokenize energy efficiency.
According to its white paper, the Efforce platform solves the three main problems of the energy efficiency market: the difficulty of putting ‘contributors’ (investors) and ‘savers’ (energy-efficiency projects) in contact, the size of the investments required, and the type of financial return.
Crowdfunding with the Efforce token solves the first two problems. When you buy an Efforce token, you are technically buying into future energy savings.
To put it simply, energy saved=money earned. In a more ambitious use-case, ordinary consumers who own the Efforce token can also use the energy saved to pay off their own energy bills. This is a never-before-seen kind of financial return.
Efforce began trading on HBTC on December 3.
There are two main concepts to know in the Efforce project:
- Energy Service Companies
- Energy Performance Contracts
As Cointelegraph reports, Efforce claims that energy services companies (ESCOs) tend to have limited access to traditional capital, as banks lack the technical expertise to properly assess the return on investment.
ESCOs can register energy efficiency projects with Efforce and it will validate the projects, and evaluate their investment needs, calculate returns and create Energy Performance Contracts.
There will be a smart meter on the company’s blockchain to measure each project’s energy savings and turn them into energy credits that are saved in investors’ profiles for use or sale.
An Energy Performance Smart Contract guarantees the savings obtained over a certain period of time of a specific energy efficiency project. The energy savings generated become a tangible asset in the hands of token holders, who may decide to sell them or use them to reduce their electricity bills.
The first two proposed projects are a 9 megawatt industrial electricity, heating, and cooling plant in Italy, and a hotel complex on the French Riviera.
This isn’t his first foray into the blockchain space. As Coindesk reports, in October 2018, he founded a blockchain-based venture capital fund called EQUI Global ‘in an effort to disrupt the venture capital and funding industry’.
Wozniak has spoken about how he thinks blockchain can help decrease the public’s environmental impact without requiring people to change their habits. While it must be admitted that any significant impact to the current climate emergency will require us to change our habits, tokenised energy efficiency is definitely an encouraging start.
