An Austrian projection is set up to apply blockchain to help find waste heat hotspots in the cities of Vienna and Graz.

Announced past the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) on May 12, HotCity'due south proof-of-concept involves creating a gamification organisation to crowdsource hotspots around the city and channel them to provide public heating.

The platform will use the Ignis blockchain, function of the Avidity ecosystem developed by Swiss company Jelurida.

Sustainability in Austrian cities

Vienna hosts one of Europe's largest district heating networks, which provides hot water through centralized heating lines in the city.

I of the benefits of such a organization is the power to use waste matter heat from industrial processes to provide consumers with free energy. This has an obvious impact on energy efficiency and CO2 emissions. Viennese energy providers merits a reduction of 75% in energy consumption thanks to this system.

"Plus-free energy districts" that produce more heat energy than they consume tin more often than not feed some of that waste heat into the grid, increasing efficiency.

But while big sources of waste heat, similar large factories and data centers, are easy to place, smaller sources remain untapped.

The HotCity project would thus help form precise and granular data sets that could assist improve urban planning in Republic of austria. The project received a 310,000 Euro grant from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation, and Engineering science.

Dr. Ernst Gebetsroither-Geringer, the HotCity project lead from the AIT, told Cointelegraph that Vienna is estimated to produce 400 Gigawatt Hours of usable waste matter heat. Though non all of information technology will exist economical to utilize, this is what the HotCity projection is about:

"The idea is to develop a method with gamification to estimate the potentials [...] The crowdsourcing does non recover the waste rut it 'just' shows the potentials which exist."

How it works

The HotCity platform aims to make collecting the necessary data "voluntary and playful," rewarding the users with tokens that tin can be redeemed for goods and services. The citizens can submit the data with an app by doing physical on-site inspections, or fifty-fifty merely scanning photos and Google Maps.

Equally Gebetsroither-Geringer explained, blockchain is used both to secure the information and make information technology individual, while also facilitating the exchange of tokens into specific vouchers.

He speculated that utilize of blockchain could extend farther than that:

[Blockchain] could as well exist used by prosumers (small energy waste producers) if they want to sell their waste energy and use smart contracts and blockchain to do this. Simply this use of blockchain to sell the waste estrus is not implemented in HotCity."

The project will be tested in Vienna and Graz for the adjacent heating season in Oct 2022, later plans for an early on 2022 airplane pilot were delayed by the Coronavirus pandemic.