Prior to the launch of Ethereum, a consortium of its leading founders collaborated with prominent contract professionals, energy sector executives, and academic experts to investigate potential applications for blockchain technology in the energy industry, a field they identified could significantly benefit from this emerging technology.
Jesse Morris, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of this long-standing alliance, Energy Web Foundation, shared with CryptoSlate in an exclusive interview during the Real Blockchain Summit how her decentralized energy platform was designed to revolutionize and develop an intelligent, sustainable, and distributed global energy ecosystem.
For Berlin-based Energy Web Foundation, decentralization represents the next evolutionary step for the energy sector.
In a market where renewable, distributed systems of power, microgrids, and peer-to-peer energy trading are positioned to challenge industrial-scale, centralized energy generation, Morris explained that her team recognized early on that blockchain technology provided the ideal solution:
"Decentralization is crucial because it empowers consumers with greater control over how they utilize energy and manage their private data."
![Energy Web Foundation's Clean, Green, Energy Blockchain Platform [Interview]](/upload/content/202511/20251108075417_c967b2fd.jpg "Energy Web Foundation's Clean, Green, Energy Blockchain Platform [Interview]")
As the 2016 wave of early dApp projects began gaining traction, Energy Web Foundation determined that no existing blockchain platform was sufficiently robust to support their ambitious distributed energy data exchange ecosystem. Furthermore, concerns arose that they might face years of waiting for the "appropriate underlying technology" to emerge. Even in 2018, Morris maintains that the majority of blockchain projects remain stalled in the proof-of-concept phase as a result.
However, it was this very technological gridlock that inspired Energy Web Foundation's experimental mission: to develop the exact technology they believed companies would need "to implement sooner rather than later" and leverage blockchain to transform the energy sector.
Partnering with Rocky Mountain Institute in 2016, a US nonprofit promoting renewable energy and sustainability, Energy Web Foundation co-established the Energy Web Foundation (EWF) in Switzerland in January 2017 and commenced development on the Energy Web Chain—an open-source blockchain "specifically engineered to meet the regulatory, operational, and market requirements of the energy sector."
With founding Energy Web members including Ethereum co-founders Gavin Wood, Jutta Steiner, Aaron Davis, and a team of other talented blockchain developers and energy engineers, Energy Web Foundation appears to have hit the ground running in its mission to build "the definitive" dApp platform for energy applications.
Three years later, the Energy Web Foundation seems poised to enter the market.
With a live Proof-of-Authority, Kubernetes-based enterprise blockchain network, Morris asserts that the project's mainnet "open, decentralized energy data exchange platform" will deliver substantial value to the market through numerous commercial applications when it launches in mid-2019.
Both startups and "forward-thinking utility corporates", such as Tokyo Electric Power, are utilizing the Energy Web Chain, with numerous other startups and utilities, primarily concentrated in Europe, developing a diverse array of dApps including renewable energy certification and trading, shared charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, demand flexibility, grid-management applications, and billing systems," Morris stated.
However significant the impact Morris (also a board member at a leading EU institution for promoting innovation, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology) believes the project will have on the market, she suggests it may take considerable time before regulators fully embrace the project's "most innovative" use case, peer-to-peer energy trading. As mentioned during the interview:
"It's understandable that regulators want to ensure energy is provided and traded safely. It will take considerable time to align both the legal and technical frameworks necessary for the most transformative aspects of blockchain technology."
![Energy Web Foundation's Clean, Green, Energy Blockchain Platform [Interview]](/upload/content/202511/20251108075418_827c1afa.jpg "Energy Web Foundation's Clean, Green, Energy Blockchain Platform [Interview]")
"Several governments are utilizing regulatory sandboxes to test what appears to be a fundamental shift toward peer-to-peer energy markets," Morris noted. Nevertheless, she places her confidence in Europe as the future leader of innovation in the energy blockchain space—not only as a continent with "a patchwork of progressive regulation and green technology", but as the home base of numerous Ethereum developers.
