A $3M EarthDay Present For ImpactPPA
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When you’re four billion years old, you might prefer to just forget your Earth Day completely. But in a world plagued by ocean garbage patches, holes in the ozone layer, and facing a lengthy hot flash, a few million dollars toward an environmentally-focused business can only be a good thing.
Earth Day is on April 22nd, and this year one blockchain project is preparing a very special Earth Day present: a public sale of tokens that will be used to finance independent renewable projects around the world.
ImpactPPA aims to create a platform where decisions are taken by a community of donors to help renewable energy projects around the world. It claims it will be able to remove layers of red tape and bureaucracy as well as speed up the process between the funding and eventual consumption of renewable energy.
And today, Millennium Blockchain, which focuses on providing capital and strategic partnerships to emerging blockchain enterprises, announced that they have agreed on a letter of intent (LOI) to invest $3m in venture capital with ImpactPPA – a significant boost to the project ahead of its Earth Day token sale.
“Millennium Blockchain’s investment should allow us to quickly ramp up our clean energy deployments, and beyond that, they really understand the value we can bring to the blockchain community and the world,” said Dan Bates, CEO of ImpactPPA. “They are huge advocates of what we do, and supporters of the clean-energy future we can enable.”
Other companies, such as WePower (which has a market cap in excess of $35M) have also taken on a socially-conscious role in the energy world. Their blockchain-based model allows green energy producers to raise capital using tokens. CEO Nikolaj Martyniuk explained that “WePower has shown that green energy and sustainability are some of the most supported challenges by communities across the globe that blockchain can solve”.
Power Purchasing Agreements Decentralized
Designed to decentralise Power Purchasing Agreements (PPA) by using a blockchain; a tokenised fund; and a decision-making process undertaken by a community of donors; ImpactPPA wants to enable communities to fund and create the energy projects that they need.
Instead of waiting for approval from centralised authority or NGOs, ImpactPPA enables contributors to effectively propose renewable energy projects which, subject to approval, can then be linked up with the required funding.
The end-consumer of the renewable energy project pays for the electricity they use with GEN credits. Each project leads to the minting of a certain amount of GEN credits on a specific time frame.
Equal to the amount of energy produced, GEN credits are minted for the duration of a PPA and can be purchased in fiat and stored in a device, such as a phone. Consumers can then purchase energy with their phones through the smart meter and these are paid directly back to ImpactPPA and used to fund additional renewable energy projects.
ImpactPPA suggests that not only will projects like these be more environmentally-conscious than regular energy company projects, they will also confer a social benefit where it’s needed most – speeding the electrification of rural areas, for example, or refrigerating vaccines in remote locations.
Their first project is a partnership with the Earth Day Network, and involves bringing renewable energy to the Edna Adan Hospital in Hargeisa, Somaliland, which provides maternity care and has treated over 21,000 women throughout Africa.
The Unusual ImpactPPA Model Is Based On Transparency
ImpactPPA relies on donations but in return for their contributions, donors receive Impact (MPQ) tokens that give them voting rights to approve proposed projects. Although ImpactPPA HQ will have a role in the decision-making process, it will also provide the information and data to allow the community to reach a decision.
By essentially using a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) ecosystem, it simultaneously provides both the means to raise donations and the framework for determining which renewable energy projects to invest in.
In order to keep a steady stream of external income coming in, ImpactPPA plans to buy up MPQ tokens and resell them to new donors.
Following the public sale scheduled to begin on eponymous ‘Earth Day’, MPQ will also be tradable on exchanges. Although an exact price has yet to be definitively determined, sources within Impact PPA have indicated a target price of roughly $0.35 per token.
Compensating For Bitcoin?
The power needed annually to mine for Bitcoin is currently estimated at 60 TwH, nearly double what it was when it had the same energy consumption as the entire country of Ireland at the end of last year.
And even though it won’t eat up “all the energy in the world”, as one hyperbolic pundit observed, using blockchain – the technology behind Bitcoin – to fund renewable energy solutions does seem appropriate given the power consumed by PoW mechanisms.
In many situations, small-to mid-scale renewable energy projects have a distinct infrastructure advantage over the conventional power station-grid dynamic. They can facilitate the creation of independent, self-sufficient electricity that doesn’t require the same kind of capital investment (or foreign money) as a large-scale electric distribution channel that wouldn’t find economic sustainability in rural, isolated, and remote communities.
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