Local Solar as NFT on Polygon: sourcing local generation

For us to address our climate emissions we need good data. We also need a space where people can share their green energy and interact. We're demonstrating what that looks like on Polygon.

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Inspiration

In founding the project I spent years building solar for local residential and commercial projects, completing the builds for each from start to finish. For many customers they have no tools that enable them to engage or participate with the Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs), which could add value to them building solar. Web3 provides an open-access layer that we can automate with Polygon to reduce climate emissions through green energy.

What it does

Our project connects to a solar generation site and records data from the device, then places it on ipfs with Polygon. The project demonstrates a residential PV system owner minting a Polygon NFT for their Solar Renewable Energy Credit (SREC). The project also assigns a reporting identity to the solar inverter, providing a path for further automation.

How we built it

We pulled secure data from a solar PV generation device and brought a record of that on chain, pinned to IPFS using https://web3.storage/ . The system provides a record for the SREC that the owner could claim, sell or share. We built it using accessible tools on the Polygon network to mint an NFT while including energy attribute metadata. We also assigned a DID to the inverter and created a schema template for energy data around best-practice standards.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting to the device and formatting data into a meaningful token were the biggest challenges. With industry standards around energy changing its challenging to determine best practice design. With the recent introduction of 24/7 carbon free energy standards, a granular and hourly approach is what leads.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to successfully mint an nft that represents 1month of energy data, and demonstrates an active energy credit with value. On the voluntary market, this energy data represents a locally sourced green energy credit that a business could purchase for their energy needs. During the hackathon we also launched a landing page: https://web3renewables.com/ -- please reach out to us if you are an installer, developer, or green energy purchaser!

We also provided a W3 centric pathway to purchase and potentially finance solar systems with the Polygon community. Our work experience includes building $M+ in Solar PV systems, and we're excited about an energy token standard on Polygon for green energy sourcing.

What we learned

What the IoT device reports is not formatted with what the market would want to see as a standard. We spent time changing the inverter data and NFT template to reflect best practice in the industry, showing a pathway from raw generation data to energy market asset.

What's next for Sourcing local Solar PV onto Polygon

We intend to continue building this project to bring larger networks of generation sites online through Polygon. We'd also like to automate our process to enable scaling and ability to incentive people to build solar PV systems with us.

Our roadmap would take us further into the generation device and automating market tools to invest in energy builds, clarify data standards, and build community on Polygon who wants to engage with green energy.

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