Supply and demand always have to be balanced for the electricity grid to operate reliably. Situations like high or low demand, but also under and oversupply have to be managed actively by distribution system operators (DSOs) and transmission system operators (TSOs) using ancillary services such as balancing energy and demand response mechanisms.

For industrial and commercial consumers that account for 55.4% (32.18TWh in 2021) of Switzerland’s electricity consumption, there are sufficient measures in place to react to imbalances in the electricity grid by providing balancing energy and flexibility to TSOs and DSOs.

However, for private households that are still accountable for 34.6% (20.1TWh in 2021) of Switzerland’s annual electricity consumption, there are so far no mechanisms to:

1. trigger and incentivize grid-serving behavior of private household end-consumers

2. enable bi-directional real-time communication between private households and utilities

3. enable utilities to request and gain access to electricity data from a large number of end-consumers and to use their data for a different purpose than invoicing of electricity consumption

Task: Based on live consumption data of 2-3 households in Switzerland and the VIA SkylightTM framework (including a variety of Web3 technologies like blockchain smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, and privacy-preserving encryption) supplied by VIA Science, we ask the participants to develop an application that enables:

1. end-consumers (data creators) to share real-time electricity data in a data privacy preserving and cyber secure way by being able to grant or revoke data access permissions for utilities or other energy service providers

2. utilities and energy service providers (insights buyers) to remunerate end-consumers for sharing their electricity data from end-consumers (e.g. with VIA SkylightTM tokens)

Goals: The solution shall be based on the VIA SkylightTM framework and its underlying functionality. It shall establish direct communication between end-consumers and utilities / DSOs by enabling third parties to compensate (data creators) in real-time for their energy data and actions while at the same time end-consumers remain in full control of their data and its usage.

Resources Available to Participants:

• Real-time electricity consumption data of 2-3 households in Switzerland
• VIA SkylightTM framework (including Web3 technologies like blockchain smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, and privacy-preserving encryption)
• On-call DevOps of VIA Science to answer technical questions
• API documentation

🧑🏼‍🏫 VIA Science, Ray Neubauer