‘Within WindNODE, we developed a readily available open-ended list in which the players of the energy industry can provide their data,’ says Dittwald. Instead of a “Data El Dorado”, he suggests another term: ‘We want to create the yellow pages of energy supply.’

The web platform is publicly accessible at datenmarkt.windnode.de. Here, hundreds of data sets are stored: data on electricity feed-in at the high-voltage level in Berlin, the list of power plants in Germany, an overview of the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) with readily available charging stations for electric cars or the data of the German weather service. ‘This is several terabytes worth of data. There was a fair bit of groaning from our colleagues, as they had to expand the storage space in the computer centre,’ Dittwald remembers. 

The project description of the WindNODE workstream affirms the following about the old world of energy data: ‘Nowadays, data exchange systems are often based on bilateral agreements and proprietary interfaces and data models that are not usually made available to third parties or can only be integrated at high costs.’ A yellow page directory, however, would enable the participants of the energy industry to network information technology in an area of any size or complexity. Companies that are currently seeking out new collaboration partners in a limited and analogous manner would be able to search for partners with complementary energy properties in this data catalogue without limitation, such as the refrigerated warehouse and wind farm operator. The matches on the energy and data marketplace of the Fraunhofer Institute will be exposed by developers in order to generate added value.

All that being said, many hurdles still need to be tackled if this vision is to be successfully achieved. Not only from a regulatory and legal perspective, but technical IT obstacles also need to be overcome. First, the data outlining energy-relevant properties need to be standardised so that they can be connected in the first instance. ‘For an open-ended list, data need to be formatted in a uniform manner or illustrated by metadata so that they can be processed more easily,’ Dittwald explains. 

Metadata communicate how the available set of data and figures must be interpreted. Where is the title of a data set located? Where does it display what this data set is about? Where can you find the numbers that are relevant for the energy industry? The metadata also specify the source of the published data and what legal licence they are subject to.

In the energy data and energy service marketplace at datenmarkt.windnode.de, the researchers of Fraunhofer FOKUS for instance added load data from installations in Berlin’s Siemens factories. Siemens and its machinery are involved in their own WindNODE project (‘Controlling industrial load management as a whole’).

‘We can see the consumption of load installations in 15-minute cycles,’ says Dittwald. A current date is connected to the load profile along with linking information to the specific installation. From this data, assumptions can be made regarding flexibility, and a provider can consider whether or not to offer electricity for this particular load profile.

In the case of Siemens, the data were submitted in the prevalent CSV format. These are comma-separated table data in text format. Other data are available in the form of Excel, XML or JSON, a widely used and preferable IT format.

The weather data of the German weather service were also made available as CSV files and written in the same syntax. ‘Now, the data can be correlated, and one can consider to time the machines in such a manner that they consume energy when there is an abundance of electricity from weather-dependent renewable energy sources on the grid,’ says Dittwald.

Philipp Lämmel sums up the challenge: ‘We have to achieve that a certain load does not always consume electricity at the same time, at around three in the morning, but rather also at eight in the evening.’ As part of WindNODE, the researcher of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) strives to answer the question of how blockchain can be used for the contracts between energy suppliers and consumers.

The potential is colossal: ‘Blockchain could play a central role in the digitalisation of the energy system as the transaction technology simplifies the

exchange, the validation and the documentation of data,’ according to the German energy agency dena. ‘Blockchain can be used for contracts in the same way as the internet is used for information,’ American IT group IBM promises. Here, blockchain acts as an open transaction log that can be accessed by all business partners and cannot be altered single-handedly. As a result, direct and secure trading among thousands of suppliers and consumers becomes possible.

One famous energy industry project is that of New York borough Brooklyn, in which households with a solar installation could sell surplus electricity to their neighbours and pay each other in their own digital currency. The revolutionary aspect is that direct trade could, in theory, make local electricity traders redundant. ‘Blockchain has a disruptive potential, like Uber for the taxi market, job exchanges for the newspaper ad market or video platforms for the traditional regional pay TV,’ Lämmel explains. Blockchain could make the middleman, the broker, redundant.

For the energy industry companies, this is both a threat and a potential new business segment. ‘Blockchain has only been acknowledged and taken seriously in the past few years. Today, no one can predict how it will be utilised in ten to twenty years,’ says FOKUS researcher Philipp Lämmel.

To enlighten the technical aspect of blockchain, it is often described as an operating system that was developed specifically for the mutual conclusion of contracts with a large number of contract partners. In the technology world, it can be comparable to Microsoft Windows as the operating system for PCs or Android for smartphones. Just like how there are different operating systems from different manufacturers, the ‘blockchain’ operating system is also offered by various developers. Ethereum, the blockchain used by WindNODE, is a ‘global open-source platform for decentralised applications’, which is supported by a foundation whilst developed by a world-wide community.

The data are saved in blockchains in a constantly lengthening chain of digital blocks. The more transactions are recorded in a new block each time.

The new information is then linked with the previous end of the chain, similar to the replication of genetic information. However, the constant generation of new blocks in a giant network of distributed computers also leads directly to one of the greatest disadvantages of all blockchain systems; the power consumption of blockchains with proof-of-work as consensus algorithm is off the scale. To put it into perspective, the famous Bitcoin blockchain alone consumed as much electricity in 2018 as all of Austria, according to the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation of the German government.[1]

[1] EFI Report 2019, page 85, left column.

The WindNODE blockchain was not devised for private trading of solar power, but for the transmission and distribution grid level. ‘In principle, solutions for flexibility trading are already underway,’ says Lämmel. However, these solutions are always centrally organised and require the market participants to agree on a central entity that is trusted by all participants. However, this is not the case for blockchain: because all transactions are tamper-proof, this “decentralised haven of trust” replaces the central marketplace operator.

After the contract is signed between parties, the trade can now be settled in the Ethereum cryptocurrency, the exchange rate of which was around 500 euros per ethereum in November 2020. In principle, however, the trade could also be linked to a currency such as the euro. Lämmel: ‘This is more expensive but would eliminate financial risks due to fluctuations in the exchange rate of digital currencies.