Glow is an Ethereum-based photo voltaic mission trying to realize 100% renewable power by decentralizing electrical grids all over the world. The corporate is lower than a 12 months previous and has raised $30 million in a funding spherical led by Framework Ventures and Union Sq. Ventures.
Glow operates a decentralized bodily infrastructure community, or DePIN, of photo voltaic farms in the US and India. To encourage the farms on its community to outperform “dirty” power grids, the founders designed a whole economic system primarily based on an incentive mannequin of subsidies and tokens.
“The way it works now is that Glow seeks out solar farms that are borderline viable and gives them just barely enough money to get them over the line for construction,” CEO and co-founder David Vorick mentioned. “And then the financer, the one who’s giving out that money, that person is the one who earns all the token rewards.”
Glow helps struggling photo voltaic farms by protecting the prices of getting them up and working with cash from financiers, “either crypto or private equity investors that see a good case for returns,” Vorick mentioned. He calls this a “recursive subsidy.” Then, the farm should contribute their electrical energy income to an incentive pool to be distributed to different photo voltaic farms.
As a way to reward these farms for his or her work, audits of every farm are carried out periodically to evaluate and confirm their output of electrical energy and Glow carbon credit— Vorick’s spin on carbon credit, tax advantages awarded to conventional photo voltaic farms for lowering greenhouse fuel emissions, that he says are inefficient.
Every week 175,000 tokens are distributed to the highest-performing farms. House owners of every farm obtain the stablecoin USDC for the manufacturing of Glow carbon credit and GLW, the native token, for electrical energy manufacturing.
Often in photo voltaic farming, subsidies are allotted primarily based on output quite than profitability, leading to cash being wasted on worthwhile photo voltaic farms with out creating extra power, Vorick says.
“But this recursive subsidy solves that conundrum, and makes it so that any money you spend incentivizing the construction of solar is laser focused on solar that is just barely able to exist without help, and that means that your subsidy is having a lot more real world impact,” Vorick mentioned.
GLW is used to buy carbon credit after which these tokens are pulled out of circulation, creating worth strain and bringing worth to the Glow ecosystem, Vorick says.
“The glow economy and the glow token is backed by the value of the solar assets that are being produced on the protocol,” he mentioned.
There are 63 operational photo voltaic farms on the Glow community which have produced 365 megawatt hours of electrical energy to this point. The corporate plans to onboard a brand new 4 megawatt photo voltaic farm in India quickly.
This funding spherical contains $6.5 million of funding for the corporate and $23.5 million of photo voltaic funding. Vorick plans to make use of the cash to scale the corporate from 5 megawatts of energy to 600 megawatts throughout the subsequent 18 months and increase into new nations.
“So long as stakeholder interest in carbon neutrality continues, we think Glow could see massive adoption across multiple markets,” Michael Anderson, Co-founder of Framework Ventures mentioned in an announcement
