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How to own Energy anywhere in the world?
ethninja (25) in energy • 3 days ago
Before I begin; let me brief on how the blockchain came to exist. So there was a need for a decentralized method to process transactions; all that existed out there was purely centralized (bank and online payment processors are an example); centralized meant that the organization had full control of the operation.

enter image description here
Image from https://pmessentials.us

Now the idea of decentralization is not new. There were many attempts before but failed. For those that did not fail were still centralized in most of their operations. For example stanford’s Folding at home (participants would donate their computing power for academic/scientific research; the whole process is distributed). This maybe be operational but not as popular as the blockchain.

Why those platforms did not thrive as the blockchain did? Simple. no economics to it. People’s machines consumed electricity without being rewarded. So people did not contribute as much as you would expect. That is exactly why the blockchain came to shine. It had the incentive aspect. People were rewarded for processing. Despite the mechanism people started competing to get the reward.

With Bitcoin the rewarding system is what is called the proof of work. You need to prove that you can solve a given problem (hashing according to a specific pattern) if you are the first to solve the hashing problem you get the reward. Hashing depended on the CPU power so people started customizing CPUs and later came miners which were just custom CPUs dedicated to hash the SHA256. Here is what an miner looks like
enter image description here

The algorithm in bitcoin evolved; it got complicated every-time. As powerful machines started competing, people started mining farms; since the coin (reward) became hard to get. Its price went up as well. One drawback or let me say a hickup came to shine. Electricity consumption got really high. To get an idea here is how a farm of miners might look like (the farm below has 10,000 Antminer S3):

enter image description here
Image from https://www.coindesk.com/my-life-inside-a-remote-chinese-bitcoin-mine/

1 Bitcoin transaction has been known to consume as much power as 30.5 US households for a day; some even classified bitcoin mining as an environmental disaster [1].

4NEW decided that they can solve this problem. Given bitcoin and the blockchain in general had more pros than cons the solution was worth making. Guess what 4NEW did?

enter image description here

In an innovate way they decided to contribute to both the environment on one end by consuming waste (burning waste reduces the volume of waste by about 87% [2] so you would not see much of the image below) and to the mining process on the other end by providing Energy and a rendering farm.

enter image description here
Image from https://renewablesnow.com/

You might be wondering how does the waste turn into energy? There are many techniques and technicalities to it but could be simplified or categorized to two main categories. Thermal and Non-Thermal.

Thermal meant that the process involves heating up the waste enough to generate specific compounds in which those compounds are safely treated. Since you will have to account for the pollution and dangerous substances. 4NEW details on the techniques and mentioned the pros and cons of each technique. They even mentioned the details on how they are accounting for safety. like the adoption of carbon filters in the plants.

How about we brief on the two categories to get an idea how technical the process is. It is in constant research which is really great. As we mentioned thermal methods involve burning the waste/garbage. The process of burning produces steam that interns is used to generate electricity. Usually there is a large incinerator with a boiler connected to a generator.

Consider the image below:

Image from # WTE plants installed in 10 European Cities Research by Chaliki, et al 2014
Image from WTE plants installed in 10 European Cities Research by Chaliki, et al 2014

The process happens as:

Collection of waste into a pit (we see in blue on the left side of the image above).
Passing the waste to a combustion chamber and burned (the crane in the image above moves the waste)
Heat resulting from the burn results in steam in the boiler.
The steam would enforce pressure which will turn the turbine and produce electricity.
Pollution prevention systems would filter the gas resulted from the process before releasing smoke.
Now let us see a sample of the non-thermal technique. Non-thermal can involve Bacteria. Yep I said Bacteria. Bacteria is not all about diseases or sicknesses. Ever imagined it can be used to produce Electricity as well?

It turns that some Bacteria exist in waste and naturally produces electricity[3]. Using microbial fuel cells we can harvest that electricity off that bacteria. The microbial fuel cells have two electrodes (anode and cathode) connected using an electrical connection.

As part of the Bacteria metabolism it breathes out electrons to the anode and through the electrical connection they are passed to the cathode to complete the electrical circuit. You can visualize this like a battery.

enter image description here
Image from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_fuel_cell

Those were examples of the methods used to generate electricity from waste and you can see it is a research in progress because of the value those method bring forth. 4NEW opting for waste-energy means they are here to stay for the longest possible period. They have really come a long way. they have recently published a video of one of the plants and described how the plant will operate. The two operating Waste to Energy power plants currently generate ~ 10 megawatts per hour.

4NEW Plant

The thought that is likely to circulate in your head now is; “that is great but what is that has to do with blockchain?” That’s what we are going to talk about next:

Recall earlier I mentioned that 4NEW aims to solve problems from two ends? the environment on one end by using waste and providing energy the other hand. 4New has its own coin to use throughout its system. The coin is called KWATT.

Energy is not the only contribution offered by 4NEW; Currently they have two plants set. One would be a plant and a mining farm. You can use their mining power backed by the energy captured from waste from the first plant. The second plant’s energy is used to push electricity to the UK national grid.

What this means is that you enable the physically constraint business to operate internationally. You can own KWATT token and utilize the 4NEW power plants remotely. How is that?

KWATT is an ERC-20 tokens. Which means it utilizes the Ethereum network. The total number of coins that can ever exist is 300 million KWATTs. It is estimated that each plant will generate about 10 megawatts/hours on launch. The plant as it develops is expected to generate 4x that value of 40 megawatts per hour. To keep this in perspective 1 megawatt equals 1000 kilowatts (KWATTs). Each household consumes about 1.5 kilowatts per day. So 1000 kilowatts would operate 650 households.

The KWATT coin is pegged to the actual WATTs and would represent 1 Kilowatt and that is how you can own electricity internationally and without having to be constrained to a specific location. With KWATT tokens it means you can do two things. You can sell the tokens to the UK national grid as energy; since 1 KWATT represented the same actual Kilowatt. The other option is apply the token to 4NEW’s cryptocurrency mining farm.

With the many ideas taking place we can see how the blockchain made these great ideas come to shine. I hope to see 4NEW expanding to other regions as well. Waste is a huge problem. Electricity consumption is just as huge.

[1] https://4new.io/ [Accessed 21st Apr 2018]
[2] https://www.eia.gov [Accessed 22nd Apr 2018]
[3] http://www.geobacter.org/ [Accessed 23rd Apr 2018]

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energy power waste
3 days ago by ethninja (25)$0.03
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[-]cnote328 (25) · 3 days ago
Thanks for sharing this insightful article, I sure learnt more about 4NEW project, their concept of converting waste into energy is really brilliant.
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[-]ace44 (25) · 3 days ago
Yea, is a really exciting project that's needed, it takes away waste from our environment which are hazardous to life and convert it to something useful
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[-]anilbg (25) · 3 days ago
I agree. This is nice article. Also I like what 4NEW is doing. 4NEW aims to solve problems from two ends? the environment on one end by using waste and providing energy the other hand.
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[-]cryptossi (25) · 3 days ago
Nice article ethninja, it actually explains the 4NEW project extremely well. I really want to invest in this project now!
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[-]geewynn (25) · 3 days ago
4new will surely help improve blockchain in terms of energy creation for mining cryptocurrencies and also help the environment by making it clean.
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[-]darkoth89 (25) · 3 days ago
4NEW is one of the projects i've been looking forward to for months, even more so that they've not purchased two fully functioning plants that are already producing 10MW of energy. Can't wait for the mining to go live around June.
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[-]geewynn (25) · 3 days ago
Yeah.. It is really amazing seeing the kind of work and passion the team is putting into making the project a reality.. They deserve an award.
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[-]ace44 (25) · 2 days ago
Yes, they are really here to make a difference, i mean, aside the profit that they will generate, they are trying to make our lives much better and create the needed avenue for more individuals to join the cryptocurrency community
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[-]ace44 (25) · 3 days ago
Nice article, 4NEW is actually a herculean project that will revolutionize the blockchain industry by providing alternative source of power , i'm really grateful that projects suggest as this are available to tackle the issue that awaits the industry, lovely project
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[-]owillz (25) · 3 days ago
This is indeed a well detailed article and the pictures also are captivating. Nice read for everyone.
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[-]faulerwilli75 (25) · 2 days ago
This is a really interesting idea to generate electricity through waste incineration and mine coins. The miners are always accused of the great waste of energy, if the electricity is now produced by waste incineration, which will hopefully mute some critics :-) Thanks for the article, really very interesting
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[-]geewynn (25) · 2 days ago
Which also means electricity companies and government agencies won't accuse blockchain miners of using too much energy and also not following the green computing guidelines.
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[-]darkoth89 (25) · 2 days ago
Yeah, if you haven't already should check out the average electric that BTC uses for a single transaction, last time I looked it was the equivalent of 34 US households, insane. Hopefully 4NEW will help with this.
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[-]anilbg (25) · 2 days ago
I agree with you. Token mining consuming lot of energy and this could have been big issue in future. But 4NEW team came up with solution which will solve 2 issues at same time. Tonnes of waste will be removed and energy will be created.
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[-]rielp (25) · yesterday
Very informative article and the plant tour video is great!
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[-]ganeshramk (25) · 3 days ago
Very nice and well written. I am following 4 new for long time now. Its reaching high every other day and reaching every corners of the crypto world.
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[-]phantam (25) · 3 days ago
Will be interesting once the full blown platform is up and running. watching these videos from the plant are insanely exciting I mean seeing this kind of progress already is nuts
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[-]ace44 (25) · 2 days ago
I get it, some individuals are just die hard dumpers, who cares?, this is a project that will so drive the value of its tokens upwards because of the vast issues they it tends to solve, imagine what happens when everything is operational, is really something to behold
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[-]cryptossi (25) · 2 days ago
Yeah I can understand that the discounts that were on offer during the early stages of the token sale could cause people to dump their tokens. However I don't think that many people will dump, KWATT has the potential for its token to grow massively and the benefits on offer to token holders will make people want to HODL.
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[-]owillz (25) · 2 days ago
For a while now, I have been following this project on their bitcointalk thread. Their idea is a very interesting one and they have been to a large extent consistent in most areas. Let us hope it ends better
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[-]acecool (25) · 2 days ago
This is a master piece wow! The article really made simple a lot of concept for me like the bitcoin mining part and the use case of 4new as both an environmental friendly project and energy project its a win for the environment and the inhabitants too
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[-]ioannar (25) · yesterday
Great and very explainative article!!!!
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[-]geokandas (25) · 22 hours ago
This project shows the potential of implementing blockchain to all kinds of aspects in our every day life and how this technology is a great tool! Well done to 4NEW for thinking of the environment!
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