RedGrid is a mission-based business that was formed with a key goal in mind—create the transformative innovations needed to fight climate change and bring energy access to the 1.2 billion people who do not have it. We knew that in order to achieve this, we needed to not only build these technologies, but also create an ecosystem that empowered the development of disruptive energy applications.
This is why we are building The Internet of Energy.
The Internet of Energy (IoE) is a software protocol that can be integrated into devices that produce, consume or store electricity. It gives them the intelligence to communicate with one another, and take collective action to unlock energy value for the individuals that own them and the network as a whole. Developers can then build applications on the Internet of Energy to harness this collective intelligence.
RedGrid will be building the first applications on the IoE.
RedGrid will be open-sourcing the IoE protocol to enable developers to build the transformative energy technologies that will bring clean energy to everyone.
Recently, we completed a crowd equity fundraising round, in which we were the 6th Australian company ever to reach the maximum possible investment. We are now launching into the next chapter of our business and we invite the Holochain community to ask us questions, get to know the team and find out what’s next for RedGrid.
Do i understand the following correctly?
RedGrid is building, with HoloSuit tools, a collective intelligence AI implementation with distributed authorities, which
can scale up until very large and complex
can respond nevertheless collectively very fast
works massively parallel
remains stable, unlike central hierarchy controlled power systems
is designed to be safe from attacks
is resilient, unlike central controlled power systems
can cope with complexity, dynamic use and production, non linear components.
Resembles how nature & synergy shaped survival of bacteria cultures, swarms of birds, emergent behavior of antshills.
My greetings from Holland , Jaap
Love this project guys! Eager to see how things progress. Here’s a couple questions I’m holding right now:
Could you share a bit about the IoE protocol? Does it play a role in enabling economic flow between devices and consumers? Or allocation of resources? Or both?
What business model are you guys thinking of, given the protocol will be open sourced? Credits? Or a stream of revenue back to the shareholders? We’re thinking through these aspects for Sacred Capital as well, so we would be happy to hear more.
One of our team-mates (Jethro) is brainstorming with IoT companies who are keen on using our reputation protocol. I think reputation will play a key role in energy devices too (for instance, pricing could be a function of reputation). Any thoughts along these lines? Maybe we should open a conversation here?
Hi Jaap, ok first question. Thanks very much!
Yes you’ve nailed it Jaap.
We are using Holochain’s unique agent centric software model to tackle grid stability and optimisation from the bottom or device up which we believe provides unique and powerful benefits over the current approaches which employ client server top down command and control. We feel that to address the needs of an increasingly distributed and decentralized energy system we need to employ a truly distributed and decentralized software. Holochain is unlike any other pattern in allowing us to do that.
In terms of what an agent-based bottom up grid looks like and the opportunity it provides we are really discovering some amazing things and having lots of fun as developers. The most exciting of which is that we can really model and mirror nature’s approach in software to solving problems.
In particular we have been able to model and show that individual energy devices when configured with some very simple DNA rules based on a local state and state of the devices neighbors begin to exhibit emergent behaviour to heal and balance in real time.
This happens without central servers or manual intervention and is fractal in its scalability.
This is truly amazing stuff as it shows how with Holochain’s architecture and RedGrid software we can create a truly self healing grid
As you mention this has other flow-on benefits like security, privacy and end user empowerment that we believe are superior to top down solutions like SCADA.
The model also has important applications and benefits to the way and speed with which problems are dealt with today. Using the agent based ‘biomimicry’ model we can treat issues in the grid like infections are treated in the body in that the cells nearest the source will be first to react. Messaging and reactions slowly propagate out from the infected area.
This is very powerful in the energy sector in that energy issues like an overheating transformer because the local neighborhood of devices will immediately see and react around the infected area before the issue compounds and begins impacting upstream parts of the grid.
… and of course we are always open to help and cooperation with our partners both here and overseas
Thanks @sidsthalekar.
The protocol itself will provide user and device capability and measurement. Part of that solution is that any actor device, human or other participating has an integrated ‘mutual credit currency and reputation’. This currency will be used for balancing, coordination, to incent certain behaviours and in time will become an economic tool for communities, individuals and devices.
In terms of the RedGrid business model we will provide services and infrastructure around the IoE protocol that give it value. We categorise the services that RedGrid will provide as follows: 1) Project and Operations Services for the IoE - This will include project services, software integration expertise, IoE education services.
2) Applications and Premium Analytics Services - This includes orchestration and optimisation ‘applications’ for balancing large communities of devices. It also includes premium analytics capability from energy devices and communities that we will sell to energy managers or grid providers to better make decisions and direct investment.
3) Currency services - We will provide on-ramp and off-ramp facilities and services for IoE participants when redeeming IoE currency. For this we will collect a transaction fee.
Regarding reputation element absolutely this is a core part of the transactional energy system we are building. Actually in many ways we believe reputation is a more useful metric than a simple token value for a device.
We’ve been chatting with the Holochain and Holo team about this aspect and have been working closely with Arthur Brock and others in the community to frame up what this will look like for the IoE.
PS - its great to know you and Sacred capital are working on this and would love to discuss as we both progress.
Our first application is focused on air conditioners. Our partner ZEN Ecosystems make a device that can control any split system air conditioner. We connect a community of these devices in a region to Holochain and allow them to react as a group to stability issues in the grid - like an overheating transformer. The air conditioners in the group switch off temporarily according to an algorithm. This relieves the pressure on the grid without impacting comfort of the end users. i.e. it switches off for too short an amount of time for people to really notice - and it gives them credit benefits - within this solution we also include a reward ‘program’ that provides direct benefit for end users that they can redeem for value.
In terms of the differences… well, we see the Internet of Energy (IoE) protocol is something we as essential for an open and integrated energy system. RedGrid as a business is helping to bootstrap and develop this protocol and will provide value added services around it but the IoE capability is something that will be entirely open source and available for any developer of business to leverage. So the IoE and RG are mutually supportive but independent entities.**
In the energy sector, even the new energy sector, for the most part providers are all creating closed, walled off software solutions to balance, orchestrate, coordinate and communicate between devices. We see the base protocol that is needed in energy has to be like TCP/IP for the internet - RG wants to create the IoE to enable it to be available for all to build on.
The reason this is important, is because to deal with the climate problem, we need massive scale. But massive scale needs a distributed system (like the internet). This is why we feel the IoE is necessary. Just like the internet the energy ecosystem needs a free and open source software standard through which devices makes can communicate, integrate, and provide shared value.
