Prosume awarded the “Blockchains for Social Good Prize” from the European Commission

We are honoured to announce that Prosume has been awarded the ‘Blockchains for Social Good Prize” from the European Commission! Our open source and interoperable blockchain solution for sustainable and decentralised energy production and consumption has been selected among almost 200 applications coming from 43 countries worldwide.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) Prize has awarded €5 million to six winners selected in a call to identify scalable, deployable and high-impact blockchain solutions for societal challenges. The winning solutions propose blockchain applications for fair trade and circular economy, increasing transparency in production processes and quality information, improving accountability and contributing to financial inclusion and renewable energy.

I warmly congratulate all the winners. The proposed solutions show how blockchain can create positive social change by supporting fair trade, increasing transparency in production processes and e-commerce and contributing to financial inclusion by exploring decentralised economic structures. I hope that this award can help upscale these outstanding ideas and inspire many others innovators. (Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Innovation Research, Culture, Education and Youth)

This is an important victory for us and the whole renewable energy community: energy was not foreseen in the official prize categories, and we won ex aequo with another company. The energy transition is one of the biggest structural challenges humanity is facing today: our vision is that in the current climate crisis renewables need to be considered a common good (instead of a mere commodity) and that decentralising their production and distribution is crucial to avoid the appropriation of this common good by energy monopolies, which can easily create an artificial scarcity with strong repercussions on social and economic inequalities.

In a world that is increasingly digital – thus dramatically energy-dependent at household level as well as at industrial one, the energy sector transition should be a worldwide priority. Imagine a renewables-based economy, where both the energy and the infrastructure distributing it are considered common goods, just like the streets we walk in. Where privacy, data protection and information security are the backbones of decentralized energy platforms and infrastructures. Where citizens are empowered to make sustainable choices and own their local energy production. This is the world we are building at Prosume. (Alex D’Elia, Founder and President of Prosume)

Due to the magnitude of the material infrastructure needed to run energy production and distribution, decentralisation alone in the energy sector does not guarantee that at the level of governance there will be a shift of power from big players to citizens: indeed, most blockchain projects in the energy market limit themselves to localised tokenisation of energy led by monopolies. Instead, PROSUME addresses the problem of social justice in the energy market by allowing the equal participation of prosumers to energy production and balancing. The centrality of prosumers implies increasing the amount of renewables in circulation, reducing the monopoly of traditional energy players, optimising energy consumption and production, as well as rewarding citizens who produce and consume responsibly. In a word, a true decentralisation.

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