Cactii Powerchain

Micro-trading energy with AI and IoT home automation

Cactii Powerchain is an Internet-of-Things (IoT) and blockchain-enabled energy micro-trading initiative, making power more affordable to households within a community by trading their excess solar power with their neighbours.

Members can buy cheaper power from their neighbours, or trade their spare capacity at better than grid feed-in rates.

We've taken this further with IoT automation that uses AI (machine learning) to learn your usage patterns and use those to take control of smart devices and appliances within the building, turning those on when you have excess solar power and off when you need to conserve your power most.

A smart home that thinks for itself

Imagine if your commercial property or home could

🔸 Monitor current power usage and be able to decide whether it should rather bid on purchasing extra power from a neighbour, or rather switching off the hot-water heating.

🔸 Proactively warn you of excess power use based on learned usage patterns and predictions, allowing you to better manage your power usage.

🔸 Auction off your spare solar generated power for the highest price community buyers would be willing to buy for (in near-real-time) without you needing to get involved.

Imagine if this could all be done automatically, using the power of Artificial Intelligence, Internet-of-Things and Blockchain.

Cactii Powerchain is an IoT (Internet-of-Things) and blockchain-enabled energy micro-trading initiative, aiming to make power more affordable to households within a community by trading their excess solar power, maximise the return on their solar investment. Members can buy cheaper power from their neighbours, or trade their spare capacity at better than grid feed-in rates.

Smart use of technologies

This initiative brings together a broad set of technologies that challenge current energy retail regulations and drives the industry toward more practical uses of smart homes, with better home automation and automated power trading (and auctioning). We see a world where a home with solar panels and grid connection, will use:

Internet-of-Things (IoT) - to connect and automate devices across a household, including solar inverters and smart meters.
Blockchain - to tokenise power units and facilitate the tokenomics of trading those units across the community in a transparent and trusted form.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) - to analyse the near-real-time usage and generation data to provide reporting and automated decision making (such as trading or device control).

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Wondering how you can make smart use of technology?

Stage 1: Automation Prototype (2023/24)

We anticipate the Australian energy retail regulatory landscape will not change quickly, so we have initially focused on building a prototype that shows how near-real-time monitoring of power usage and solar generation can be coupled to IoT concepts in home automation, to allow automated decisions, alerting and analysis. In all, this stage aims to show that an artificially intelligent assistant approach can be used to monitor and react to power realities, including simulated cooperative trading.

Our prototype setup monitors a couple of household smart power meters and solar generators, feeding that usage data into cloud storage where it is automatically analysed for reporting and actionable purposes. We use a combination of Google Cloud services, Wattwatchers (behind the meter power auditors) and Samsung Smartthings to bring together IoT home automation and cloud-based AI analysis and reporting, to offer;

🔸 user dashboards with usage and predicted use and costing

🔸 dynamic subscriber alerting via SMS, email and even X.com

🔸 automated device control and response (such as switching on/off air-con or hot-water heaters to manage power usage load)

Stage 2: Tokenomics & Regulation

Brings together the power of using blockchain to record and facilitate the tokenomics of power units across the community and the the regulatory components needed to enable micro-energy-trading. We see this stage happening in two parts;

a) Blockchain engine (prototype mid-2025)

The blockchain engine is primarily the private blockchain record of all energy units created and moved onto and off of the power grid, including the powerchain members, the grid operator and participating retailers.

It manages all pre-committed cooperative contracts (token exchange prices) and auction thresholds (prices members are prepared to pay for ad-hoc transactions). The member's AI assistant then uses that information to buy, sell or participate in automated token auctions, based on the specific power conditions at that household and their own defined power priorities.

For example:

On a hot summer's day, a member may have chosen to operate their air conditioning, taking them over their daily budgetary power usage threshold. Instead of buying power from the grid at 30c/kWh, the AI assistant bids on excess solar power being generated by a neighbour, to a maximum price limit of 20c/kWh, saving the member 10c/kWh.

At the same time, the neighbour is able to sell their excess power at 20c/kWh, instead of the standard 8c/kWh feed-in rate for their supplier. With the supplier's facilitation fee of 5c/kWh, the neighbour makes 12c/kWh more than if they normally would have and the supplier/grid still make 5c/kWh for handling the transaction.

b) Energy retail licensing (2027)

Being able to have a simpler energy retailer license means the member cooperative can trade in energy among themselves and the retail network. It will allow us to negotiate standing rates agreements with the preferred retail partners, grid feed limits, token expiration periods and national trade arrangements.

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