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Project Zero is not intended to be available for use, purchase, or access by U.S. persons, including U.S. citizens, residents, or persons in the United States of America, or companies incorporated, located, or resident in the United States of America, or who have a registered agent in the United States of America.

Blog · Core ideas

Blog #2: Introducing Project Zero – Let’s Unf*ck the Planet

Introducing Project ZeroPart 2 of 4·Published on 11 Sept 2024

We need to make energy clean, affordable, and abundant. We need to do it now. Project Zero is built to both incentivise the transition to net zero, and to make it effortless.

The goal of the project is to build the world’s largest decentralised energy network, a virtual power plant with 1 TW of global renewable capacity. We’re building a suite of products designed to streamline the net zero transition, and a token-based economic system to incentivise action now.

Putting Power in Your Hands – The Project Zero Product Suite

Our products are built and released by Fuse, a vertically integrated renewable energy company from the same team. We’re building a product suite that wraps up the complexity of the net zero transition into a set of simple, distributed, rewardable actions. The core features of the project are the following:

  1. Renewable electricity – The goal of Fuse is to build 1 TW of combined physical and virtual renewable power capacity, which will be delivered at a discount to network participants. We have spent a year building real-time electricity billing, which forms the bedrock for more advanced products.
  2. Grid support – Use your energy resources, such as solar, battery, and smart thermostats and EV, to export green electricity and shift energy demand. Make the grid greener and more flexible, while earning rewards and discounts.
  3. EV charging – We’re creating a world-class EV charging product that allows you to easily navigate and pay for public electric charging, while earning for driving your EV. On the other side, we will allow any parking lot owners to easily convert their property into EV charging destinations. Think intelligent EV routing on a global decentralised charging network.
  4. Home electrification – We’re building a vetted installer marketplace, with standardised installation processes and financing for solar, batteries, EV chargers, and other distributed energy resources. Think Uber Eats for installations and a simple app to manage your energy.

The reality is that there is already a lot of latent desire amongst the community to take these actions. We just need the right incentives to unlock them.

Progress Squared – The Project Zero Growth Cycle

“Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome.” — Charlie Munger

One of our key focuses in building the project was to create an economic system that rewards participants for the value they create for the network and for the planet.

Project Zero tokens are earned by taking actions which contribute to the growth of the network, and may then be burned to access discounted solar, battery, EV, energy efficiency upgrades, and incredibly cheap renewable energy.

The Project Zero growth cycle is shown below, which is themed around value creation (green) and value capture (blue).

PROJECT ZERO GROWTH CYCLE

PROJECT ZERO GROWTH CYCLE

Value Creation

As the network grows, more DERs and renewables are deployed. This has an important impact on prices. In electricity markets, generation offers are stacked from lowest to highest price, and the price which meets the required demand sets the price for all electricity sold that given period (e.g. one hour). As cheaper renewables make up more of the stack, more expensive fossil fuel sources have their offers filled less often, driving their prices up further to recover costs.

Alongside electrification and macro trends pushing demand up, this leads to a widening spread in prices between hours served by renewables and hours served by fossil fuels. This results in a higher earning potential, for shifting demand out of dirty hours and into clean ones.

Project Zero tokens provide a means to access this earning potential, and are primarily awarded to contributors based on the economic value their actions create.

Value Capture

As more demand is shifted by the network, this benefits the environment and the grid, resulting in cleaner and lower cost electricity. Token burning allows users to then access to lower energy bills and other cost incentives on the network, such as discounts on solar and battery DER installations. This creates higher demand for the token, and can correspondingly generate better returns for network activities.

Next Steps

We have now raised $90M from top-tier investors including Multicoin Capital, Accel, Lowercarbon Capital, Ribbit Capital, Anatoly Yakovenko, Nico Rosberg, and others.

We’ll be launching a points program in Q1 2025 ahead of the network’s mainnet launch, tentatively pinned for 2025. The first product demo will be revealed at Breakpoint, Solana’s annual developer conference.

2025 will be accompanied by the launch of the Fuse installer marketplace, the launch of the Fuse retail energy provider in multiple international markets, and the release of the Fuse EV network.

We see Project Zero being the world’s largest decentralised energy network, and the project token to support a common, globally adopted currency and settlement layer for all things energy.

A future exists where renewable progress is not choked by outdated grid infrastructure, where the electrification of our economies is not to the detriment of our climate, and where the people have control and autonomy over their energy use and production, and energy is clean, affordable, abundant for all.

To learn more about Project Zero, visit zero2050.com. To stay in the loop, follow us on X at @projectzero2050.

Disclaimer

This document does not constitute an offer or solicitation for investment and it should not be construed or interpreted to be one. Project Zero tokens are not intended to be available for use, purchase, or access by U.S. persons, including U.S. residents, or persons in the United States of America, or companies incorporated, located, or resident in the United States of America, or who have a registered agent in the United States of America. The tokens are not and will not be available to such U.S. persons and should not be resold to such persons.

No regulatory authority has approved, whether formally or informally, of any of the information set out in this document. No such approval has been or will be sought under the laws, regulatory requirements or rules of any jurisdiction. This document has not been approved by any competent authority including, but not limited to, in any Member State of the European Union, in the United States of America, in the United Kingdom and in Jersey.

Next article in this seriesA Primer on Grid Infrastructure
CORE IDEAS · PART 3

A Primer on Grid Infrastructure