Data Certificates For Energy Markets

IRL

Inspiration

For this hackathon, we wanted to work on problems that could benefit from the power of programmatic blockchains. After going through the idea maze we noticed energy markets in Colombia hold huge opportunities.

What it does

We noticed one can predict with reasonable certainty the short-term generation levels of most hydroelectric power plants because they are mostly based on current water levels and weekly precipitation data. Even though it seems obvious that financial players could open credit lines backed by those future generation levels, most fail to do so because by the time they have verified the water level data and weekly precipitation data the events in the field have drastically changed.

We propose a system whereby financial institutions can allow hydroelectric plants to mint information certificates that can then be rapidly assessed to open credit lines backed by those future generation levels.

How we built it

We built a simple erc721 contract where hydroelectric providers can mint NTFS that store some environmental variables from a list of designated oracles.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was trying to understand the energy markets of Colombia. Few too little documentation is available and the API we decided to use to gather the environmental variables is sometimes unavailable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of how simple the implementation turned out to be. At first, we really wanted to create functions that could quickly calculate the credit lines and systems that would allow the transfer of money to happen on chain. However, we decided to keep the project lean and just keep the things that these financial companies actually find useful.

What we learned

We found out that working with somebody that actually has experience in the industry can save one a lot of time.

We got a better understanding of how chainlink works by just trying to build a primitive version of chainlink`s contracts.

What's next for Data Certificates For Energy Markets

The current implementation does not use a decentralized oracle provider but rather a simple centralized oracle. The next step would be to actually launch a decentralized data feed on chainlink for 2 key environmental variables: current generation levels at x facility and weekly precipitation data around x facility.