Digital identities for ‘trust’ in Germany’s energy system

The German Energy Agency (DENA) is leading the DIVE project to leverage digital identities to integrate and manage renewable energies in a decentralised landscape.

The DIVE – ‘Digital identities as trust anchors in the energy system’ – project, which has been reported by Energy Web, is focussed on establishing secure and reliable digital identities for devices and systems within the energy sector.

These can then act as trust anchors, verifying the existence and capabilities of each system in real time.

By automating those verification processes, the electricity use cases that the devices are participating in can be changed quickly and easily to ensure grid stability and cost savings for energy consumers.

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With the large scale of expansion of renewable energies in Germany – as elsewhere – the system is decentralising and with increased consumer choice use cases such as renewable energy tracing, providing flexibility to the grid and supplier switching need seamless integration for efficient energy management.

Energy Web reports to play a central role in the DIVE project, including taking the lead in developing and implementing use cases related to electricity labelling and verification. This includes the use of digital identities in conjunction with the registry and exploring energy industry use cases and their links to the identity register.

Additionally, Energy Web intends to extend its existing open-source Green Proofs solution to connect to the digital trust anchors of DIVE and leverage the Energy Web X chain (EWX).

The Green Proofs solution is designed to enable trustworthy device identities to connect with different registers for guarantees of origin.

In the project, Energy Web will develop standardised representation and description forms for smart contracts under DIVE. This includes classification within the energy industry context, ensuring implementation-independent descriptions of inputs, outputs, conditions and logic of smart contracts.

The establishment of a ‘Smart Contract Register’ as an ‘app store’ for decentralised applications and logic devices, along with the provision of smart contracts under free licenses, should set the groundwork for an independent technology library.

Throughout, Energy Web aims to support existing standards and platforms, such as EnergyTag, the Elia Group platform Energy Track&Trace, GO, REC, I-REC and the German guarantees of origin register (Herkunftsnachweisregister, HKNR).

Energy Web also is integrating the ReBeam ‘fast change of supplier for EV charging stations’ solution with DIVE. Initially tested with Elia Group and 50Hertz Transmission in Berlin during the summer of 2022, the integration ultimately allows the consumption of self-generated PV power at public charging stations.

Other partners in the project are Forschungsstelle für Energiewirtschaft e.V, Oli Systems, KILT Protocol, Fieldfisher and Fraunhofer FIT.