Blockchain Platform Electrify is Helping Singaporeans Cut Energy Costs
Businesses in Singapore are slashing electricity bills by up to 25 percent using the blockchain-based and AI driven platform, Electrify. The platform will be available for residential use and use in Japan and Australia later this year.
Electrify: A New Blockchain-based Energy Platform
The energy industry is perfectly situated to benefit from decentralization, according to Electrify’s co-founder and CEO, Julius Tan. It would seem Singaporean businesses are in agreement. Twenty-nine year old Benson Wang is a restaurant owner who has used Electrify to save substantially on electricity costs.
Wang’s restaurant is just one of around 500 local businesses that have adopted the technology, cumulatively saving 1.5 million Singapore dollars over the past year. To help customers save money, Electrify gives them access to multiple energy providers on a single dashboard where deals can easily be compared. The platform also uses smart contracts to handle administrative and accounting tasks, which saves around 30 percent in transaction costs.
Tan hopes that Electrify will make it easier for people to choose an energy source. He also hopes that it will increase the accessibility of renewable energy options, which is more important now than ever. According to the Asian Development Bank, annual energy use in Asia is expected to rise from $700 billion to $1.6 trillion by 2035.
The Electrify platform is the natural next step for the energy industry, according to Tan. “Many industries are going from centralized to decentralized to the sharing economy,” Tan told CNBC and added that Electrify sees “…the energy industry as no different.”
Digitizing the Energy Industry
“The electricity retail business is not digitized in many countries, especially in Asia, so customers have lots of options but no unifying platform,” said Tan. To bring the industry into the twenty-first century, Tan and his co-founder David Lim have implemented Artificial Intelligence in Electrify, which matches people with energy plans based on their budget and usage.
According to industry analyst Mark Hutchinson, new disruption in the industry could leave traditional companies behind. “These new entrants provide both competition and opportunities for collaboration,” Hutchinson told CNBC.
Electrify is currently only available to business customers. It will be available to everyone starting this fall, when the company also plans to expand beyond Singapore to Japan and Australia. Tan hopes to roll out an energy-sharing model that will give power-generating households the ability to share power with other homes, much like We Power, which launched an experiment in Japan earlier this year. The expansion will be funded by investors, who supported the company with $30 million in an Initial Coin Offering in March.
