At the occasion of the Chile Climate Week 2018, CLI together with Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) and the Ministry of Energy Chile organised a workshop on blockchain and renewable energy on October 19th. 

The workshop's goal was to enable design thinking around blockchain and the promotion of renewable energy production and usage.

Participants from the energy and climate community as well IT developers from the blockchain space discussed the respective challenges and potentials. The Workshop was moderated by Fulvio Xavier, an IT expert from Sao Paolo, Brazil. 

After a welcome note by Christian Huebner, Head of the Regional KAS Programme Energy Security and Climate Change Latin America Nicolás Westenek from the Ministry of Energy explained the plans of the Government to examine the possibilities of applying blockchain to public facilities with solar rooftops.

In the first part of the workshop, participants identified the need for "good" regulations combined with a proactive role of government as a key condition to promote the much needed innovation in conventional energy systems. Particular focus was given to the potential of tokenization in order to facilitate the generation and exchange of digital assets such as RE certificates or carbon credits. Identifying, understanding and optimizing the demand side of the token business was seen as a crucial requirement (where is the markets?) for ensuring successful use cases. International Agreements such as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the Agenda 2030 with its Sustainable Development Goals or the Biodiversity Conventiom and its Nagoya Procol were identified as possible drivers for future market demand of "green" digital assets.

In the second part of the workshop focus was given on concrete blockchain based use cases in the renewable energy sector. Ivan Razo-Zapata, a computer scientist and lecturer at National College of Ireland introduced NRGcoin. A project that shows how blockchain and its tokeneconomics can help overcome problems within net metering (NM) and subsidy schemes like Feed-in Tariffs (FiT). Mr. Razo-Zapata showed that NM and FiT may lead to oversupply and underdemand of electricity. By applying a tokenbased model Razo-Zapata managed to adress these challenges.

The second example was provided by Manuel Loesch, a researcher on smart grids from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany). Manuel Loesch provided his experiences on setting up a network for electric vehicle charging stations based on the distributed ledger technology of IOTA. Besides the potential decrease of transaction costs in the case it became clear that in addition decentralization may also lead to lower overall costs. Especially in cases where decentralized energy use works without grid fees and taxes.