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https://defi.lightency.io/
Inspiration
Energy is one of the pillar issues that have led to the acceleration of climate challenge – and yet is key to slowing its dire effects.
A huge chunk of the greenhouse gas that blankets the Earth and traps the sun’s heat is caused by energy production, resulting from the use of fossil fuels to produce electricity and generate heat.
In contrast, renewable energy sources – available in abundance are naturally replenished and environmentally unharmful. At this crucial point that will make or break the human future, we need to orient investments– including investments in technology and infrastructure – to renewable energy projects to allow us to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
The issue does not reside in the funds available yet in the need for commitment and accountability; that's where Lightency steps in and builds a model aimed to accelerate renewable energy adoption using a classic method that will increase monetization and incentives. The purpose of the service is to put together a system for the issuance and management of Renewable Energy Certificates (REAs).
Lightency offers anyone the opportunity to stake our tokens to become a member of our community and participate in the governance of the energy fund and the treasury. Additionally, it allows contributors to the energy projects to collect Green energy certificates.
What it does
The main purpose of REC is to act as an accounting vehicle to prove that produced energy comes from a renewable source. RECs are mostly used to address sustainability reports regarding Scope 2 emissions.Our project consists of multiple key DAOs : A treasury Dao that will fund an Energy pool
An energy pool is governed by the DAO as several rules should be set up to maintain governance. Furthermore, we included an Organisation DAO that will represent energy producers or green energy certification buyers and an Issuer DAO for the custodian.
The Treasury Dao is to govern the treasury of the company; only council members will be able create proposals, and community members ( Vesters and shakers ) can only vote.
The energy Dao is to govern the energy pool, i.e. decides what projects should be invested in.
The users of the platefrom can be number of stakeholders from different countries (ex: Tunisia and Nigeria) in the platform, energy providers can be utilities, private energy producers, or retail producers (households and businesses). Additionally, certificate buyers can be businesses, organizations, utilities, or traders.
Issuers, on the other hand, can be governmental institutions or Public Private organizations. These institutions have several rules and protocols that need to be respected for verification, transaction confirmations, and audits. As such, we introduced a DAO-based model that allows every organization and certificate issuer to define their own rules as long as their outputs are interactions with the platform and fellow users.
How we built it
The lightency team utilized scrum methodology to synchronize and manage the workflow and members. We worked along with 4 developers and UX designers, a scrum master and a product owner.
We shared thoughts with custodians, sponsors, and investors to define the product and built a first version during the meta build Hackathon.
Challenges we ran into
As there is more than one stakeholder in the platform, Organisations and Issuers.
Organisations Governance can vary from one to another. Issuers as well can vary from one to another, especially if they are in same region, can create conflicts in the decision making.
For these reasons we decided to organise the governance with DAOs that can mutually interact. Tech challenges:
1- We faced a few obstacles with batching multiple transactions coming from 2 different smart contracts . Using the signAndSendTransaction method from the same library taking one smart contract as an argument, we succeeded in changing the architecture.
2- We also found some issues in dividing the NFT into FTs as shares come from the REC and solved the issue through research and brainstorming.
3- We tried to upgrade the user experience when interacting with DAOs. We built an off-chain cron API which will make our DAOs fully autonomous, executing the tasks after each proposal expiration.
4- We also faced issues with distributing the stake reward for each user daily. We built another Cron API off-chain that can calculate the reward for every user and deliver it to them.
Accomplishments we’re proud of
The lightency team partnered up with a major school of engineering in Tunisia “Ecole National d'ingénieur de Tunis ENIT “and its electrical Laboratories, in collaboration with the Mediterranean Energy Agency (MEDREC) as a sponsor and technical advisor, to set up the platform and test it before introducing it to Tunisia National Energy Agency (ANME) to be the first energy certification platform in the country.
The collaboration consists of building the microgrid with PV solar and Batteries in selected university departments to produce renewable energy, certify it and transfer the resulting certificates between these departments. The process will reduce the carbon emission of the university and the departments within it (In this case, the departments are organizations, and the university administration is the issuer).
Simultaneously, we are building the platform and testing our service with other organizations, such as the Mediterranean Energy Agency (MEDREC).
What we learned
Challenges that made us stronger:
Lightency learned to capitalize on change by taking advantage of the new legal policies that will be set up to make countries more sustainable and environmentally-friendly.
Lightency is a global project operating in several countries, including but not limited to Tunisia and Nigeria, where new policies seem to be on the horizon. These policy changes will encourage investment in green energy sources such as solar power and wind turbines and make every institution concerned consider it a priority in their business development. The coding phase to set up the registry module presented several challenges operating with different stakeholders and users from different countries (Tunisia, Nigeria). To solve the problem, Lightency team applied a more efficient model by setting up an effective DAO system–based module. The lightency system will automatically and autonomously organize operations ( registry, issuance, transfer), making it easier to operate with numerous organizations, stakeholders, and users in different countries.
What’s next for Near Energy certificates
As soon as platform development is finalized, ANME will be added as a first Issuer of certificates and will thus be minting the first Tunisian energy Certificates ever on Top of NEAR infrastructure.
We believe this is a fundamental milestone for a more environmentally-conscious governmental and business environment. RECs will shape the way for organizations and households to be incentivized to render their use of energy more efficient and thus limit their carbon footprint.
Winning a prize in this hackathon will allow us to finalize the development of the platform that we will be presenting for Nigerian energy developers In January 2023. The Rural Electrification Agency in NIgeria is creating a workshop to permit the energy producers to test the platform and get familiarized with the energy certification concept.
It will be an opportunity for us to select the best energy developers to create a pipeline of projects in which the energy fund will invest. Meanwhile we will be implementing the certification in Tunisia with stakeholders mentioned above. We estimate this to happen by June/July 2023, During these 8 months we will deliver a Beta version of the product, raise funds to make the team bigger and initiate our token. Here is our Dapp that you can test : https://defi.lightency.io/ and our website : https://lightency.io/
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