7EnergyDAO
Energy Communities without Banks
About the project
7EnergyDAO is the smart contract based part of the community-driven 7Energy platform which enables P2P 🤝 trading of renewable ♻️ energy within energy communities, without the need for any bank 🏦.
What we need to solve
Climate change driven by the excessive burning of fossil fuels 🛢️, and currently, 75% of the 175,000 TWh of primary energy we use goes to waste. By widely implementing electrification without compromising modern lifestyles, we can save 50% of that primary energy and create a sustainable and healthy energy system for everyone. 😊
Energy communities are critical to solving the gargantuan task of reducing carbon emissions fast enough and become cabon neutral by 2050. Therefore, the EU 🇪🇺 passed the "Clean energy for all Europeans package" in 2019 and now Austria 🇦🇹 is one of the fronteers in the EU to revise the heavily regulated energy sector and make energy communities a reality.
As you probably can imagine, there is a high administrative burden on energy communities, e.g. forming a non-profit organization, data transfer integration, various processes to add and remove people from the energy community, accounting and payment, tax filling and payments, etc. The frontrunning pioneers 😅 are frequently venting their frustration about the complexity and the callenges they face, like they did on the Energy Communities Conference 2023.
Our Solution
The 7EnergyDAO utilizes all the benefits of blockchain which makes the financial management of energy communities much easier and far less costly. 🥰
Once a member joined the non-profit energy community, it can determine the use of funds from the cooperatively governed treasury through the 7Energy share token.
Producers 🌞 receives their money for sold power fully automated, daily.
Consumers 🛍️ pay their consumption automaticaly through an allowance with their wallet.
All capital flows happen fully automated P2P between the members and the tax filling 🧾 will be automated as well, once all the processes are in place.
The payments for external service are automatically deducted as well and will be managed through a Monerium account, so that an interface to the banking system 🏦 can be provided as well.
What makes us special?
We believe in democratizing and decentralizing energy will contribute enourmously to the fast deployment of renewable energy sources and therefore reduce emissions. 📉
With our approach of using blockchain for what is was introduced - MONEY - it can disrupt the business model of banks whose main innovation is still the introduction of new fees. 💸
Energy communities are then not just reducing the dependence on utilities, but also on banks. We would call that a WIN-WIN-WIN situation. 🫶
Is it globally useful for everyone?
Yes, and we invite everyone to have a look at the currently open-sourced contract code for the 7EnergyDAO. Wherever you start an energy community, you will have to comply with national regulation, but at the end you will be able to conduct P2P 🤝 payments and handle community investments via the treasury in an efficient manner.
We also won't stop with Austria 🇦🇹 only, but as already mentioned, this is a frontrunner country and we look forward to help with our solution also in other EU 🇪🇺 countries.
Our Vision
We firmly believe that we can still make the Paris Agreement a reality by empowering everyday people to install renewable ♻️ power production. This will ensure that our children and grandchildren will have a better life with less pollution and more happiness. 💚
Solution wise we believe that it needs further abstraction of blockchain specific user interfaces, like "Connect Wallet" for a real breaktrough. Be assured, we are already working on that too. 😊
Open source
To facilitate daily P2P 🤝 energy payments, our smart contracts are open source (Github). We believe this is crucial for widespread use of our tech stack in different parts of the world and for speeding up the transition to renewables.
How will the funds be used?
We have been initially supported by netidee for the development of the current website and the smart contracts you find on Github. Since then some activity was funded by CLUE, which was an international EU 🇪🇺 funded project.
Gitcoin is planned to be the main source of funding for the near future:
Alpha Round: Donations help to support the 7Energy v2 development (soon to be released) where we specifically improved the smart contracts and website UI.
Beta Round: Donations will help to support the development of the automated accounting and payment runs as well as the extension of being fully independent from banks.
🎯 Achievements
Winner of the Austrian Blockchain Award (NFT Certificate)
Presenting 7Energy at ETHPrague (Youtube)
Expanding the vision of the project to be globally applicable
New community members planing to build 1,000+ kWp of new solar, enough to power 500 average households
Building and testing solar power sets and integrating measurement devices
Last updated