PONTON is part of the NEW 4.0 project (“Norddeutsche Energiewende” – northern German energy revolution), which has started in December 2016. The project is financed by the German Ministry of Economics and Energy with 44 Mio. Euro. It aims at developing standards and technologies to support a faster, regionalised, and more efficient way to cope with volatility of renewables and which allows to allocate flexibility in congestion situations. Find more details here.

NEW 4.0 aims at balancing production and consumption locally in the Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg region - the first being one of the largest net exporting region for renewable energy, the latter being a huge consumer right nearby. Due to grid capacity constraints, an increasing share of generation capacity has to be shed in high load situations. PONTON will help here by linking flexibility providers with the capability to absorb excess load and requestors like grid operators.

PONTON’s contribution to NEW 4.0 is the development of a Smart Market for flexibility. This marketplace is a logical venue that executes orders from the demand and supply side. Traded products are short-term regional consumption or generation, both provided at market prices.

As experts for blockchain applications in the energy sector, our vision is to use the blockchain technology as a joint data layer to coordinate market activities such as the submission of buy or sell orders and the execution of trades. System users are DSO, TSO, industrial and private prosumers.