‘EnergieKnip’ demonstrates incentivised energy savings on blockchain

The EnergieKnip (‘energy wallet’) project in the northeastern Dutch municipality of Emmen has demonstrated the potential for incentives to deliver energy savings.

The project, an initiative of Dutch-based blockchain R&D lab BlockchainLab Drenthe with support from the municipality and co-funding from the EU, was aimed to transact energy data to stimulate energy savings and efficiencies with rewards to homeowners for its provision with a local currency token.

The project was built with the German distributed ledger developer IOTA’s technology and has involved around 30,000 households so far.

At the outset of the project, which was launched in January 2022, 50,000 wallets were created, effectively one for all the households in the municipality.

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Via an app householders were then asked questions on their home energy setup and consumption patterns, with each item of data received by the municipality rewarded with EnergieKnip points sent to the app.

These could then be spent in local retailers for new energy savings devices, such as LED lighting or a thermostat, with the retailer able to exchange them for euros.

In the first phase €300,000 (US$322,000) was distributed to 9,000 active wallets, Adri Wischmann, co-founder of BlockchainLab Drenthe, has reported.

A second project was focussed on helping low-income families to reduce their energy costs, with 20,000 families being targeted, although in this case not to obtain data but to provide targeted financial support with a total sum of €5 million ($5.37 million).

While the project is ongoing, it’s already been a success, says Wischmann, commenting that a Dutch housing association has agreed to participate and make additional funds available for people living in accommodations provided by the association.

Currently EnergieKnip has around 30,000 active wallets and is the biggest public government blockchain project in the Netherlands, he says.

Trust to share data

A key point was that data had to be anonymous and not traceable to individual households and to this end QR codes were sent out in a randomised way across the municipality with which they could activate the app.

On registration, the app automatically created the user’s wallet for their reward tokens.

Other best practices were that participants had to understand all the steps of the set-up and that the obtained data had to lead to a direct benefit for energy consumers and the municipality via an easy to use platform.

The need for an incentive also was felt to be key, as not everyone is intrinsically motivated to be more energy efficient. This in turn raised the need for the distributed ledger technology to create the incentive reward token.

In addition to the benefits for the participants, Wischmann cites other benefits including the receipt of the data by the municipality enabling the improvement of future policies, the boost to the retailers and local economy in general with the extra revenue and the wider environmental benefits of energy saving.

Future use cases

Wischmann says that EnergieKnip is just the beginning and the project could be expanded by other communities as well as being expanded to similar solutions for different fields.

One is to stimulate tourism with a QR code in hotel rooms with rewards to spend in local facilities such as restaurants.

Another is fighting heat stress in city neighbourhoods with rewards to buy plants and trees to provide shade and uptake CO2.

“Our experience with Emmen shows just what an important role local government can play in generating creative incentivisation for local people, as long as it complies with privacy rules. EnergieKnip has proven that the willingness of local communities exists. Now it is time to build on this, develop other use cases, and act together in the interest of a more sustainable society,” he says.

Wischmann also states working on an initiative provisionally named ‘MultiKnip’ to have multiple purpose-bound tokens in a single wallet.