A Note from the Founders
My name is Rumen Yordanov and I would like to guide you through the concept of #EnergyGlare.
In the past 15 years I have been working in the field of sustainability engineering and carbon emission reduction has been a central topic of my work. I have a somewhat unusual background with degrees in both computer engineering and mechanical engineering and probably that’s why I have always been obsessed with interdisciplinary solutions. That’s how EnergyGlare was born — as an interdisciplinary solution — but we will get to that point a bit later.
As a sustainability engineer, I chose to work in the most dynamic region — Asia Pacific and specifically greater China. In my first years on this market, I was lucky to work with some great and bright people in some great organization. Then, almost 10 years ago I founded AEE which grew to become a fantastic engineering company specialized in building services and sustainability. With the AEE team we have been a part of some of the largest and most challenging building and infrastructure projects in the world. That has been a fantastic journey, but it also brought about an unexpected reality check. I discovered that even the largest organizations with their abundant budgets do not manage to achieve the carbon performance that is technologically viable. And this is even more pronounced when it comes to existing building stock. Here is a description of a very common scenario in the building industry.
A typical commercial building carries out an energy audit, identifies a list of measures with a description of their carbon / energy reduction potential as well as their required capital and financial returns. Out of this list of measures, the ones with zero or very low initial investment are easily approved. Additionally, those that have very attractive payback periods are also implemented as well as those that cannot be further delayed because of equipment reaching the end of its lifespan. The rest of the measures are not realized. In fact, at least half of the identified measures will not be implemented. This has been considered normal in the industry as energy efficiency has been traditionally viewed as a means of financial optimization.
And note that I am describing the case of relatively large operators of commercial properties in high-income economies. However, there is a whole other invisible part of the iceberg — all the real estate properties that do not even have energy audits on their agenda — these are smaller organizations or organizations that do not have budget for efficiency initiatives. They form the majority in lower-income regions and economies.
It was gravely clear that this traditional mindset does not match the reality of today. This is the reality of 196 countries and territories having adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015, a legally binding international treaty on climate change that requires all parties to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-21st century. Moreover, at least 68 countries and territories have pledged to become net carbon zero, the majority of them committing to do so by 2050. However, achieving carbon neutrality is not enough. To avoid raising global temperatures by more than 1.5C on the way to carbon neutrality, certain pathways of aggressive interim reductions of carbon emissions shall be followed. These pathways are defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a dedicated body under the United Nations (UN), recognized as the leading authority on climate change research.
At this point, it was obvious that following the current industry practices would not bring us to the target. Even less so they will follow the recommended pathways. For the past few years, I started defining what needs to be done in order to catalyze the rate of carbon reduction projects implementation. The key problem was the lack of a marketplace for energy efficiency and carbon reduction projects.
That’s why EnergyGlare was conceived — to create a single global marketplace where every carbon reduction project that needs funding can be listed, everyone who wants to invest in such projects can offer their contribution and every professional services provider can offer their skillset to design or deliver these projects. Wrapping the interaction between these parties into a robust contract was easy, as ESCO contracts are an industry gold standard, and in existence for decades. And at this point, the core of EnergyGlare was already formed.
I must admit, initially I explored a traditional finance implementation of the concept. However, over-reliance on banks as intermediaries and guarantees of the ESCO contract, the associated high fees and cross-border restrictions drove the project into a stall. At this stage, I already had a few years of observation of blockchain and the crypto industry, which had outgrown the age of wild speculation, and decentralized networks such as Ethereum and their smart contracts had enabled a whole generation of layer 3 protocols / DeFi solutions to take off.
It did not take long to realize that smart contracts could be a perfect implementation of ESCO contracts and the decentralization that blockchain provides is what is needed for peer-to-peer transactions as the ones on the EnergyGlare marketplace. At this point, EnergyGlare pivoted towards blockchain implementation. The core team already had a few brilliant professionals joined and a very inspiring journey began.
As the project took a more concrete shape, the key innovations that we introduce were developed — creating a global marketplace powered by blockchain and independent from banks as intermediaries, creating the first secondary market for energy and carbon efficiency projects, introducing NFTs as means of transferring the meta value of achieved carbon reduction.
In the next post, I will go through the details of EnergyGlare and shed some more light on its functionality and structure.
