GLOBAL GRID “THE GRID OF EVERYTHING”
The grid of everything is coming, and with it a new economic paradigm, one which is changing the cost structure of established industries such as energy and enabling zero-marginal cost products to enter established markets. The mechanisms for this systemic change were established with the advent of platforms such as Napster which wreaked havoc across the information-based industries over the past decade as millions of consumers turned prosumers and began to produce and share their own music via file sharing services, their own videos on YouTube, their own knowledge on Wikipedia. This shared economy model is allowing hundreds of millions of people to now produce information, energy, and goods and services at near zero marginal cost and exchange them with each other in a sharing economy.
The rise of Distributed Energy Assets (D.E.R.’s) has already created zero marginal cost energy and in areas of Europe & North America resulted in negative energy prices. “Several countries in Europe have experienced negative power prices, including Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
But Germany’s forays into negative pricing are the most frequent. At times, Germany is able to export its surplus electricity to its neighbors, helping to balance the market. Still, its experiences of negative prices are often longer, and deeper, than they are in other countries
In one recent example, power prices spent 31 hours below zero during the last weekend of October. At one point, they dipped as low as minus €83, or minus $98, per megawatt-hour, a wholesale measure.
In other words, anyone who was able to hook up for a large blast of electricity at that time was paid €83 per unit for the trouble.” New York Times Dec 25 2017
The Global Grid platform is designed to manage the delivery of zero marginal cost energy, shift production and consumption patterns to prevent negative pricing, while lifting the lagging aggregate energy efficiency ratio from the current ceiling of 13%, this will be accomplished by Global Grid fulfilling the role as an energy aggregator for network services and solutions.
Achieving greater energy efficiency gains under the current fossil fuel-based infrastructure are limited, since the technologies designed for this system, such as the internal-combustion engine and the centralized electricity grid, have few productivity gains left to exploit. However, studies indicate that, through a transition to an IoT infrastructure, “it is conceivable to increase aggregate energy efficiency to 40 percent or more in the next 40 years, amounting to a dramatic increase in productivity beyond what the economy experienced in the twentieth century.”
The global energy economy’s current business models ability to achieve greater efficiencies and its vulnerability to the zero marginal cost phenomime may cause it to follow the music industry which was brought to its knees from the shared economy, the film industry which suffered substantial profitability reductions , newspapers and magazines which have gone out of business, and the book-publishing market, which has virtually disappeared.
Creating the market mechanisms to manage zero marginal cost energy and delivering substantial aggregate energy efficiencies has been guiding principal for developing the Global Grid renewable energy economy. The mechanisms to realize these aggregate energy efficiencies relies on the ability to:
Develop distributed, trustless and immutable architectures to feed data into the various energy models across a diverse energy landscape.
Create a systematic model, the platform must not only map and control the relationship between hardware, communications and software but also needs to reference the regulatory and legal environments in which they operate.
Design adoptive hardware, which needs to be, modular, future proofed, connected and software defined.
The relationship between Global Grid’s Gird of Everything (GoE) and Internet of Things (IoT) is at the heart of the platform’s development and will form an integral part of next economic cycle the forth industrial revolution, the basis of which is clean, green reliable power. The grid will communicate with not only the consumers and producers, but also with individual embedded devices (Including Cars), Energy Management Systems, Demand Response Programs, weather stations and predictive energy and weather analytic modelling systems. It offers tremendous promise of a future enabled by smart analytics that enhance efficiency, ease congestion, reduce waste and error and make our lives easier. Yet it faces many obstacles. Who will own the data it generates? Who can access it? What about privacy — and security? Who will pay for the infrastructure and who would truly benefit from it?
Our solution to these problems is to firstly make the data open sourced decentralized and anonymous, have it generated by the market participants, and have utility token miners secure the network and process the transactions. The costs for the roll-out of the technology and in retro fitting our cities, and infrastructure for the the IoT and the GoE will come through reductions in the cost of energy and increased aggregate energy efficiencies
