Root Granular Certificates Issuing Service

About Root

We created Root for issuers of granular certificiates to let you focus on... well issuing certificates, rather than platform development & operations and the plumbing needed to create and maintain a transparent and trustworthy service.

Root is a hosted registry service, helping publishers of granular certificates to publish verifiable, tamper evident certificates at scale for the green energy transition.

info

This product is in conceptualization stage. As such it is under development as a minimal viable product. Both concept and product is incomplete and we would love your help. Reach out at tech@sekko.dk with your feedback

Purpose and Product goal

Creating a system to match consumption and production of energy per hour can be a complex task. But creating a system that allows for international integration, transparency and cross registry validation is another beast entirely. At SEKKO we share the vision of a trustworthy, granular certification of energy system opening up a vast ecosystem of product innovation based on green energy. At the core, this is a scaling problem. At small scale and with few collaborators, granular certification can be handled by simple database solutions and closed groups of collaborators.

We want to enable granular certificates of origin at global scale, open to society and public scrutiny and fast enough to impact the way we charge our electric vehicles, produce hydrogen, run datacenters, heatpumps etc. making sure the electrification of society runs on renewables 24/7 rather than coal and gas when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining.

Our goal is to create a hosted software solution built on the novel open source software Project-Origin. We want to enable all the innovative features needed for publishing granular certificates of origin out of the box as a hosted software service.

What is Granular Certificates of Origin

A shift in the certification of green energy is happening. Several organisations and institutions are driving a shift towards a more granular certification of energy, based on hourly or 15 minute certification as opposed to the current Guarantees of Origin that published certificates on a yearly basis.

The ambition is to link consumption with production of green energy within a narrow time and geographical boundary. This will make sure that:

1. energy consumed is matched with green energy produced at roughly the same time and
2. within the capacity of the grid to actually transport the energy from production to consumption point. In reality the physics of renewable and fossil energy is the same, so we are of course talking about a virtual connection and grid representation.

The entity tasked with publishing certificated is called an issuing body and in the EU each country is represented by an issuing body as the legal issuer og Guarantees of Origin of Energy. This is often either the national Energy Autorities or by delegation one or several of the transmission system operators in a given country. Society relies these trusted organisations to create and publish certificates following international standards. in Europe the standards is set by the AIB (Association of Issuing Bodies) working within The Framework for Guarantees of Origin (GO) as set by the Renewable Energy Directive 2018/2011(EU). The CEN EN16325 standard harmonises principles across countries and enerrgy carriers. With the 2023 revision of the renewable energy directive and the Delegated Act on renewablefuels of non-biological origin (RFNBO) comes a regulatory push for a tighter coupling between time and location of consumption and production of green energy. This paves the way for granular certification issued or at least approved by all european countries including standards framework making sure that certificates are not legally counted several times as.

With or without regulation the fact remains that there are many different ways to certificy energy. The current regulation allows for several ways to claim that energy is renewable and even several legal ways to double, triple or quadrouble the green energy being produced. The systems in place today is commercial systems, running as a black box where no issuer can keep checks and balances on the other issuers. The effect is obscurity rather than transparency and blind trust rather than digital solutions to trust and governance enforcement.

To remedy this a group of organisations have created the open source Project-Origin to enable a digital governance across issuing bodies as well as other issuers of certificates. Distributed registries linked by smart contracts enables trust an validation in between issuers and blockchain based registries enable varification and tamper evidence. In layman terms it makes sure that trusted issuers can in fact be trusted, hence no double counting and that a certificate and the amounts of energy can always be verified, hence a low incentive for fraud. On top of this, advanced cryptography protects corporations and citizens data even though the registries are public and permanent.

The project is currently being implemented into the granular certificates of origins projects by Danish TSO, Energinet and Elia-group (Belgian and German TSO). This is done in the cross border collaboration project Energy Track & Trace. The collaborators in the open source Project Origins i supported these implementations. Main participants in this projects i Energinet, Concordium, Mjolner Informatics, Alexandra Institute and SEKKO.

An industry push towards granular certifications is also blooming with Google at the forefront with their 24/7 Net Zero ambition for 2030 across the globe. New ESG legislation in Europe in combination with public criticism of the current GO sets the scene for a paradigm shift towards a granular, transparent and verifiable green energy and emissions reporting system being the norm rather than niche in the coming years.

Benefits of the Open Source Origins platform as opposed to a classic central system

• Instant cross border integration as new registries emerge
• Open Source Software meaning that software is always open for review or a safety from vendor lock-in
• Claims is registered in a public, distributed ledger meaning that registries is permanent, verifiable and tamper evident
• The software is built on a privacy-by-design, protecting citizens and organizations data with advanced mathematics and cryptography
• Modular software design, means that adding features or local adaptions is simple, robust and cost effective.

Benefits of Root as opposed to a self hosted instance

• Fast deployment
• No deep specialization required for your development team
• No need to set up and maintain complex blockchain integrations
• No need for access to company public domain DNS and web hosting administrations
• Operations monitoring, debugging and software fixes to hosted application as well as the open source project on a continuous basis

Product features

• Hosted Registry including blockchain integration and hourly blockchain publications
• Hosted Govance between registries
• Hosted wallet for easy setup of identity management and authentification
• Operations metrics as API's and messaging service to key personnel
• Back-ups, redundancy and recovery mechanisms