As fuel and energy prices double, more and more people are turning their attention to rooftop solar as a way to save money on their electricity bills and earn a little extra for the energy they don’t use by feeding it into the grid. But with prices looking to increase again towards the end of the year, homeowners with rooftop solar are looking for ways to improve those savings on bills and boost the returns their solar can provide.
Award-winning London-based Rowan Energy has developed a clever way to help solar owners increase the returns from their solar installation whilst simultaneously saving them money. They do this by encouraging the household to use their home-generated energy rather than feed surplus electricity into the grid, only to repurchase it later for ten times the cost.
The Rowan Energy SmartMiner is a very low-powered device that is a smart meter and blockchain cryptocurrency miner in one.
The SmartMiner is separate from the main electricity meter and sits underneath your solar installation. It counts the energy the roof produces and what is fed into the grid. The device also validates transactions on the Rowan Energy blockchain.
Rowan Energy then rewards the customer for generating energy and validating transactions on its chain, paying 10p worth of their cryptocurrency Rowan Coin for every kWh produced by the roof and NOT fed into the grid.
By rewarding customers for using their energy and not feeding it into the grid, Rowan increases the returns a household can get for using their clean green energy. By rewarding the customer for using the power they produce. This also helps make households more conscious about utilising their solar energy and when they use it.
By changing a few small habits, they can increase their rewards.
Something as simple as rather than putting the dishwasher on after dinner, you wait until the morning or hold off washing clothes until the sun is out the next day.
On top of that, by changing these energy habits, you also know the energy is truly green. Some of the larger energy suppliers often greenwash the energy that is fed in from the grid.
Greenwashing is buying energy from the cheapest source, whether coal or gas generated, and then purchasing renewable energy certificates to offset that energy. Then they sell the brown power as green energy to unsuspecting customers who believe they are helping the planet with their green tariff. You can’t guarantee energy from the grid is truly green.
Traditionally blockchain has been very power hungry and, therefore, carbon-rich. But Rowan Energy built a new type of blockchain that is very low-powered and, therefore, low-carbon. You need to generate renewable energy to be able to mine the tokens. At the device’s core is a raspberry pi. A raspberry pi is a small, low-powered computer that only costs about £10 a year to run.
The rewards are paid from a mining pool in their own cryptocurrency, Rowan Coin. These rewards can be converted to cash through PayPal or sent to a compatible Rowan wallet on your smartphone or participating exchanges. Currently, Rowan Coin trades on the popular exchanges Probit and LATOKEN.
Rowan Energy was started in 2018 by CEO and founder David Duckworth.
The business was originally a tabletop project aimed at rewarding people for living more sustainably. But trying to quantify how much a green recycler should be rewarded for recycling plastic bottles compared to a mattress was impossible. One you might do 10x a day, and the other you may only do once every ten years.
In 2019 the UK government ended the solar stimulus program and the feed-in tariff. Now energy companies make the payments for energy fed into the grid, and with the highest sitting at 5p for a long time, it means that solar wouldn’t pay for itself for many years. Rowan Energy is bringing the ROI down to less than five years. Rowan Energy set out to make home solar profitable again.
With the cost of solar dropping, energy prices rising, and the Rowan SmartMiner going on sale, profitable solar has become a reality again.
In 2021 Rowan held a successful beta launch, selling and installing 45 SmartMiners in homes across the UK. On average, each household earned an extra £271 last year from their Rowan Rewards. These rewards are more than double and in addition to the £100, some homes made in 2021 from their feed-in.
But how can Rowan Energy pay these rewards? Rowan Energy takes the data from the households and generates a blockchain-type carbon credit called a Carbon NFT. These certificates will be available on the voluntary carbon market for businesses and individuals who want to offset their carbon and support a platform that actively encourages the adoption of rooftop solar.
David and the rest of the team are passionate about using technology to help reach challenging carbon targets set by the government.
Future developments include a SmartMiner for electric vehicles that reward EV owners for every mile they drive. Rowan is also in talks with a SmartMeter management company with compatible Smart Meters already installed that can be onboarded into the Rowan blockchain.The first 100 Rowan Energy SmartMiners go on sale to the public on Monday 1st August 2022 and can be retrofitted into existing solar installations or added to your new solar package. Please visit https://intro.rowanenergy.com for more info and to get your SmartMiner while stocks last.
