If we can make a simple analogy to explain what WePower does, we would say WePower provides a platform where clean energy producers can make their ICO to raise money to take their project forward in a cost effective and optimal way. Though they are going to provide much more than just that and I will explain why and how. Keep reading.
WePower focuses on revolutionizing clean and renewable energy production. The major challenges faced in today’s clean energy production ecosystem are:
For Investors:
- Lack of access to investments opportunities on local and global level
- Available opportunities are complicated and expensive investment proposition
For Clean Energy Producers:
- Difficulty and high cost of capital raised to develop projects.
- Long and time consuimg process of capital acquisition from banks
- Majorly dependent on Govt. Subsity to make the project viable due to high cost of capital
WePower aims to solve these critical issues by providing a blockchain-based green energy trading platform.
WePower enables renewable energy producers to raise capital by issuing their own energy tokens . These tokens represent energy they commit to produce and deliver at a future time. Energy tokenization standardizes, simplifies and opens global energy investment ecosystem. As a result energy producers can trade directly with the green energy buyers (consumers and investors) and raise capital by selling energy upfront, at below market rates.
When a renewable energy producer requires capital to finance the initial cost of a renewable energy project, he may sell a portion of the energy to be produced in the future, on the WePower platform. The buyer/investor acquires this energy in a form of internal energy tokens.
Each energy token acts as a smart contract indicating:
- Type of energy
- When the energy will be produced and delivered;
- Price tag.
This smart contract represents a standard power purchase agreement between the renewable energy producer and energy buyer.
WePower Token Model:
Energy Tokenization:
The WePower platform allows renewable energy producers to tokenize and sell the energy they produce. A renewable energy producer connected to the platform issues its own energy tokens within the WePower platform, where 1 energy token represents 1 kWh of green energy to be produced in a certain time in the future (usually within 4-6 months from the connection moment). Each renewable energy plant connected to the WePower platform will organize an auction for the sale of tokenized energy. WePower token holders will have priority access to such auctions and their allocation will depend on the number of WePower tokens they have.
Each new plant will create an auction on the WePower platform for the sale of energy tokens to energy buyers with the minimum price set for each energy token, which will represent energy to be produced and delivered.
Through tokenization of renewable energy:
- Renewable energy producers are able to pre-sell their production in a global market and acquire necessary capital, increasing a project’s profitability.
- Investors gain better investment terms (lower costs and higher liquidity) as well as access to green energy projects across the globe in a standardised way. These developments make green energy an appealing asset class.
WPR token holders will have priority access to participate in auctions for purchasing tokenized energy once the renewable energy plant is connected to the platform. Moreover, WPR token holders are rewarded 0.9% of tokenized energy donated directly by the renewable energy providers who gets listed on WePower platform to raise funds. WPR token holders may use or sell this energy.
In addition to solving current issues in the development and financing of green energy projects, WePower also has the potential to become a next-generation utility company based on the core principles of decarbonization, democratization and decentralization. By combining the core technological stack elements which include blockchain, smart contracts, data analytics and machine learning, WePower is set to become a 21st century virtual utility working closely with Distribution & Transmission system operators.. This means that green energy projects without subsidies can finally take-off.
Development Phases:
WePower development is divided in 3 distinct stages:
- WePower Breeze – Platform Creation and Market entrance - challenging the way how energy investments and purchase are done today by creating necessary technological layer for the change to happen.
- WePower Storm - Growth of services and usability - aggregating and managing energy flows via smart contracts along with integration with grids.
- WePower Hurricane - New decentralized energy utility set-up.
Projected Revenue:
Why Blockchain:
- Innovative community interaction across applications
- Provide 3rd party liquidity through exchanges and decentralised exchange protocols
- Enhanced efficiency due to smart contract elimination of intermediaries
- Enhanced security due to immutability of data
- Cheaper maintenance vs centralised database
- History of transactions and prediction of transactions
- Fault tolerance for DApps due to decentralised nature of blockchain
Use of Energy Token:
Energy tokens are different from WPR token and are allocated to the energy producers in equivalence to the amount of energy they decide to auction in the platform. The owner of these energy tokens has the following options:
- First - use the energy when it is produced, if the energy was purchased for a development project in the buyer’s home market.Note that WePower will physically deliver energy based on the number of energy tokens held, once WePower enters a token owner’s home market and begins operation under an independent energy supplier’s legal framework.
- Second - sell the energy before its production within the WePower platform to any other user.
- Third - automatically sell the energy to the wholesale energy market once the energy is produced and receive the energy price in fiat or crypto currency. This leaves an ambiguity of the final settlement price as it is done at the market price in that specific moment. However, it provides a safety net for the fund invested in energy. All energy with this option is sold simultaneously on the wholesale market
Token Sale Structure:
Sale Objective:
Team
 |
Nikolaj Martyniuk Nick has 10 years of experience working in the energy sector. Nick was building energy and solar plants, buying/selling green energy and green certificates. Moreover, he was involved in the energy import/export between countries. |
 |
Artūras Asakavičius Co-Founder, Investments Artūras is practising law at one of the biggest law firms in the Baltics, where he is responsible for all fintech blockchain and crypto currency related businesses and regulations. He is also Lithuanian fintech association chairman and two times recognised as the Lithuanian crowdfunding patron by the EU Commission. |
 |
Kaspar Kaarlep CTO, Energy Kaspar has been a leader in the European Utility and DSO sector for the last 10 years. As a speaker, technology strategist and complex problem solver he has been very active not only in his native Estonia, where he was most recently CTO of Elektrilevi – Estonians largest DSO, but across Europe. Holding the position of CTO had been a natural progression given his previous positions and duties inside Elektrilevi. He was responsible for development and execution of the Strategic |
Roadmap
-
Jan 2017
WePower is born
-
Aug 2018
1000 MW project pipeline secured
-
Aug 2017
MVP Launch
-
Sep 2017
- Deal for grid integration tests signed
- 14 energy engineers join the project
-
Oct 2017
$3M raised in an open pre-sale
-
Feb 2018
Public token sale (ICO)
-
Apr 2018
Country-wide energy tokenization tesst in Estonia
-
Nov 2018
WePower operational in spain
White Paper
| Investment Info | |
| Accepting | ETH |
| Token Info | |
| Token | WPR |
| Platform | Ethereum |
| Type | ERC20 |
| Token Price | 1 ETH = 4000 WPR |
| Token Count | 187,000,000 |
Disclaimer : Please note that we are not associated with the ICO nor are paid for preparing this review. This is our personal opinion and investors are advised to do their due diligence before investing.
WePower enables renewable energy producers to raise capital by issuing their own energy tokens. It provides a blockchain-based green energy trading platform. It tries to solve the core problems faced by the producers and investors on renewable energy. Other than monetary aspects, the environmental impact of the project is significant and thus we are quite interested to analyze the project.
We have analyzed the ICO based on the below parameters:
- Necessity or problem statement (12%)
- White paper (9%)
- Product Status (10%)
- Team (10%)
- ICO Pricing (7%)
- Business Model/Revenue Source (15%)
- Token Value Increment Options (15%)
- Social Media Presence/Hype (10%)
- Competitors (12%)
Below is the score we have given for each parameter and overall rating of the ICO.
| Parameter | Total | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
76.1
|
Necessity or problem statement |
12 | 12 |
| White Paper |
9 | 6.3 | |
| Product Status |
10 | 6 | |
| Team |
10 | 7 | |
| ICO Pricing |
7 | 4.9 | |
| Business Model/Revenue Source |
15 | 10.5 | |
| Token Value Increment Options |
15 | 12 | |
| Social Media Presence/Hype |
10 | 9 | |
| Competitors |
12 | 8.4 | |
| 100 | 76.1 | ||
Please continue reading for detailed analysis.
1. Necessity or Problem Statement (12%)
Major necessities issues faced by the stakeholders of renewable energy segment are:
- Lack of access to investments opportunities for investors on local and global level.
- Available opportunities are limited and return on investment is relatively low.
- Energy producers find it difficult to raise the required capital to complete the project.
- The financing process is complicated and time consuming thereby impacting the viability of the project.
- Due to increased cost of capital, the projects are dependent on Govt. Subsidy to be viable.
Even though it has huge environmental impact, hardly any effort was made till now to solve the core issues in this sector. So it is really refreshing to see efforts being made to use blockchain to address these. And the way the concept is designed, it will benefit not only the producers but also retail investors who otherwise are secluded from these kinds of projects. We give them 10 out of 10 for this.
You can go through their whitepaper in the ‘Details’ tab.
Decently written and exhaustive whitepaper with detailed information about the problem statement, their project plan, details about the concepts, ,revenue projection and profit generation for stakeholders. The one thing that is missing from a whitepaper for a project that claims to have a demo platform ready is the technical architecture. There is no mention of the platform design and technologies used. It was a basic expectation from a project of this magnitude. We give them 7 out of 10 on this aspect.
3. Product Status (10%)
They have a ‘Platform’ link in their website and they claim to be it demo ready. However, we expected the demo platform to be a bit more comprehensive because of the huge name of WePower. Still we can agree to give some brownie points to the team as they showcased the concept which helps the potential investors.
That apart the concept and phases are well defined and hopefully they will be executing the road-map in a much better way. As of now, we give them 6 out of 10 for the halfhearted approach.
4. Team (10%)
Decent team with huge industr experience. Nikolaj Martyniuk (CEO), Artūras Asakavičius (Co-founder) and Kaspar Kaarlep (CTO) have tons of experice and expertize to take the project forward. However, we would live to see the development team to be in place asap as that will be the core of achieving the project roadmap. They have already hired couple of full stack developers and are expected to add more to the team post ICO. ‘Complex System Architect’ in the team Heikki Kolk has great industry experience in blockchain and is a core asset to the team. We are gung-ho about the project but the team needs to add more people to it as soon as possible. We give them a 7 out of 10 for this.
5. ICO Pricing (7%)
They target to raise $35 Million by selling 55% of the tokens. That makes the company valuation at around $63 Million which is very attractive. However, we didn’t like the idea that huge amount of tokens (20%) are reserved for the team. Another 10% are reserved for future stakeholder and 15% for ‘Community and user growth’. We couldn’t understand what are these meant for as it is expected that the money raised for ICO should be used for development and marketing purposes. We give them 7 out of 10 in this aspect.
6. Business Model/Revenue Source (15%)
WePower platform will have one major source of revenue i.e. charging a fee on the capital raised on the platform. However, there is no mention of any revenue sharing with the investors. We expected some revenue/profit sharing with the token holders like most of the platforms. The only value the token holders have is the 0.9% energy that will be distributed when any energy producer registers in the platform. We think that is a bit greedy from the owners’ point of view. We give them 7 out of 10 for this.
7. Token Value Increment Options (15%)
Tokens will be the source of privileged access to energy auctions before it is rolled out to others. This itself is a decent incentive if the demand for energy auctions is more.
In addition another benefit of holding token is to receive a portion of energy (0.9%) that is received from producers when they register in the platform. These two aspects will make the token value rise with proportionate success of the platform. We give them 8 out of 10 in this aspect.
8. Social Media Presence/Hype (10%)
This is one of the major aspects that they are doing really well. Well marketed and have very dense social media presence. They are spending a lot of money on marketing and that has given them huge attention. Irrespective of negative aspects of the project, this marketing tactics will help them raise handsome money in the ICO. We give them 9 out of 10 in this aspect.
9. Competitors (12%)
There are very few players in this segment and those are localized. So WePower will definitely get first mover’s advantage in the space. But one issue that will have an impact in second phase is the barrier between countries for energy trade. Once they connect the smart grids, it will be necessary to connect as many grids around the world for the system to work smoothly. However, many countries may not allow that resulting in significant constraints in the growth of WePower. SO the success will depend a lot on the Govt. Policies of different countries on top of their own success to penetrate multiple countries and establish registered offices. We give them 7 out of 10 in this aspect.
Based on our analysis we give an overall score of 76.1 out of 100 to WePower which is pretty decent.
It is a very good concept and a novel idea. Also there is hardly any player in the market for the segment. If they achieve their road map, then it will be a huge project in few years, giving handsome return on investment. However the team, the greediness in token sale and external factors like Govt. policies leaves a lot of weak links that may drag the project down. Based on our analysis we give it an above average rating and a long term investment option with moderate risk.
Related ICOs
Restart Energy
Restart Energy, an independent European Union electricity and gas supply company with USD 20 million..