Further Recommended Research
The Windfall Protocol strategically addresses the complexities of energy-efficient retrofits across various building types and stakeholders, from single-family homes to large commercial and institutional structures. This inclusive approach not only embraces diverse building categories but also scales to integrate community renewable energy assets like solar arrays and wind turbines. By leveraging targeted incentives and advanced protocol economics, the program aims to enhance energy resilience and prioritize underserved communities.
As the Windfall Protocol evolves, it continues to explore emergent collective funding mechanisms and energy market transformations, ensuring adaptability to new data processes and fostering sustainable growth towards net-zero targets.
Inclusion of Retrofits & Stakeholder Research for Other Building Types
While this pilot focuses on single-family residential energy efficiency labeling due to the existing partnership with Durham region, energy efficiency priorities, and strategy development also include multi-unit residential buildings, small, medium, and large commercial buildings, and institutional buildings and retrofits. These other building types and installations also include different processes and data flows for energy audits which would need to be analyzed for further development to include these sectors and stakeholder considerations in additional modules to the protocol. The Protocol could be expanded to include other types of installations as well, such as community renewable energy assets like solar arrays, wind turbines, or geothermal projects, improving local energy resilience.
Targeted Incentives & Protocol Economics
Conditional subsidies and programmatic incentives could help to massively scale retrofit opportunities, by targeting them to the geographic localities or building demographics where they can have the most impact. Indigenous, minority, and low-income communities could be prioritized for subsidy support in ways that increase their sovereignty and continue down the path of reconciliation. Smart incentives could be conditioned on any aspect of building data, geographic location, or targeted energy reduction method. The customizability of these new tools, especially when tied to verifiable data, offers high leverage to energy efficiency efforts on a national scale.
Protocol economics is also an area where further research is necessary. Windfall Protocol aims to be an open and extensible protocol with broad participatory governance among users. Operational costs of the protocol could be covered through nominal fees charged for incentive distributions via the protocol, possibly being distributed among users, or pooled into a treasury governed by stakeholders.
AI-integrated Data Aggregation & Analysis
Further data access efficiencies could be provided through AI-integrated data analysis of records appended to a building ledger. This could enable a more adaptive data ontology to account for data formats that could be manually feasible to integrate.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs & Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption are state-of-the-art cryptographic technologies that hold promise to massively improve privacy and security for protected data, even while allowing it to interact with external data analysis and verification systems. In other words, data could be analyzed against certain criteria to verify information to a third party without revealing the information itself. Zero-knowledge technology is already implemented in the Ethereum Attestation Service to ensure privacy-preserving attestations in a pilot deployment, although further research into these technologies is warranted to stay on top of the latest developments in this tooling to maximize data security as the protocol progresses.
Emergent Collective Funding Mechanisms
To fully scale energy retrofit programs to the level they need to be to reach net zero targets, alternative funding options will need to be developed for retrofit financing. Loan books are difficult to negotiate with credit unions and banks due to the competition of zero-interest loans from the federal government. For their part, federal loans are capped per applicant, and often not available until several months into the retrofit process, leaving a gap in capital funding for home retrofit projects, especially among lower-income and minority groups who often have the most to gain from retrofit opportunities. New methods of collective funding for retrofit improvements could be facilitated through the Windfall Protocol, for example, collective funding for community projects. Pooling local funds as investments into community renewable energy projects such as solar arrays or wind turbines that paid energy dividends back to the community, would be some examples of possibilities that collective funding mechanisms could enable in a future iteration of the Windfall Protocol. This could allow communities to earn through decarbonization, and improve their energy-resilience in the process.
Energy Market Transformation Opportunities
The Windfall Protocol aims to address several key gaps in energy efficiency programs, but other improvements could be considered through energy market transformation opportunities. Current net-zero targets could be impeded by existing ‘cost of service’ business models, where energy efficiency improvements result in the loss of additional revenue for the utility. Alternative business models for energy market transformation are common in many jurisdictions (e.g. in New York), such as revenue decoupling mechanisms, performance incentive mechanisms using efficiency KPIs, or even transforming utilities into energy platform services. With these alternative models, utilities can act as hubs of energy infrastructure that support facilitating energy demand reduction and the purchasing and selling of energy from a range of third-party providers and prosumers. This model of emergent, localized production could facilitate faster adoption of energy efficiency targets. As these business models change, the flows of data they facilitate may also change. The design of the Windfall Protocol must be able to adapt to updates and changes in these data processes throughout the upgrade and evolution of all processes related to its data sources.
Feature Extension & Protocol Governance
To meet the data interoperability needs of a cross-jurisdictional protocol, Windfall Protocol will be composable with new data plug-ins and feature extensions. This would require decision-making processes as to updating data standards, and addressing the changing needs of the protocol over time.
Feedback & Discussion
A key objective of the litepaper is to inform constructive feedback of the protocol and inspire clarifying questions and thoughtful discussion around the protocol and its potential use cases beyond the pilot project.
Your feedback is crucial to the effective development and implementation of the Windfall Protocol. Please consider sharing your questions and feedback using the form linked below, or join our discussion forum on Discord.
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Credits
This article is based on the Windfall Protocol Litepaper, summarized by ananth.eth and edited by rathermercurial.eth for the Windfall Protocol Community.
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