Plug for Green Program

What is Plug for Green Program

Arkreen leverages the community-driven DePIN model and token incentives to initiate the supply and demand sides of its network. On the supply side, the mechanisms are “Impact to Earn,” and an example is the use of household-distributed solar power systems to issue green assets. On the demand side, the mechanisms are “Play to Impact”. Initially, Arkreen developed the GreenBTC.Club to drive the demand for green assets. Now, Arkreen's “Plug for Green Program (PGP)” is upgraded to encourage individuals in the global Web3 community to achieve personal carbon neutrality.

Smart Plug, as a miner type of the Energy Consumption Category, was introduced to the Arkreen community in September 2023. To encourage the carbon deduction of GHG Protocol Scope 2, the initial trial program incentivized people to gradually decrease their electricity consumption. The program was effective, but the electricity consumption level would finally come to a low limit. To go beyond the limit, the program is now upgraded to incentivize the global Web3 community for sustainable green behaviors.

In a word, the purpose of the new Plug for Green Program is to encourage individuals to offset their daily electricity usage (tracked by the Smart Plug) with Arkreen’s on-chain green assets. Unlike an ESG-responsible company usually greens its energy consumption in bulk, an individual’s daily consumption is too small to offset in the traditional way. Instead, thanks to the low asset transfer cost on a public blockchain, the Plug for Green Program allows individuals to offset their daily consumption at a considerably low cost. In addition, individuals can use the Arkreen green assets (e.g., ART) issued from the distributed solar PV system to offset their home consumption or green a tiny slice of Bitcoin’s historical energy consumption. For instance, you can purchase Arkreen Remote Miners from CSP community users in Nigeria, mint ART, and use the Smart Plug to track and offset your daily home energy consumption with ART. This creates a complete loop for achieving personal carbon neutrality.

By contributing to the voluntary energy offsetting mechanism, Arkreen is advocating the Green DePIN initiative so that every DePIN project and every DePIN participant can adopt a carbon neutralization infrastructure. Imaging the broad future of DePIN, Arkreen will help keep the DePIN communities growing with a positive impact on the environment. As the system evolves, more users in developed countries can directly support carbon offsetting by purchasing green assets that are issued from the green behavior by the people in developing countries, thus achieving voluntary on-chain offsets for carbon neutrality. The greener DePIN, the better our world. Join the global community in taking real action for a sustainable future!

How Arkreen Smart Plug Greens Energy

There are usually three ways to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation. The first is removing unnecessary electricity consumption (e.g., turning off the light when no one is in the room). The second is improving electricity utilization efficiency (e.g., replacing filament lamps with LED ones). The third is partially or fully replacing grid power usage with green energy, or offsetting grid power consumption with green assets.

The former two ways are intuitive, but electricity consumption cannot plunge too low to maintain an appropriate quality of life and business. Furthermore, as new technologies such as AI bring more exciting experiences and improve our daily lives, electricity consumption will inevitably increase. Like GreenBTC.Club does good to the Bitcoin community, and the upgraded Plug for Green Program focuses on the implementation of carbon neutralization for various DePIN projects in a third way.

For example, a DePIN project aggregates idle GPU resources from all over the world for AI training and inference. The GPU resource owner contributes computing power by consuming quite a lot of electricity and emitting carbon dioxide in Scope 2 of the GHG Protocol. How to mitigate the carbon emissions by GPU mining? Thanks to Web3’s flexible composibility, Arkreen Smart Plug can be used to measure how much electricity the GPU machines consume and allows the users to offset it with Arkreen’s green assets and receive rewards in addition to those from GPU mining. It’s often said to be a composible dual-mining mechanism, which attracts every environmental participant.

To implement the above vision, the Plug for Green Program(PGP) reward mechanism is composed of two parts:

Baseline rewards for continuously measuring and reporting electricity consumption to Arkreen Network
Offset rewards for offsetting the measured electricity consumption

Both baseline rewards and offset rewards are dispatched once per day.

The baseline rewards are based on the same mechanism as in the initial trial program in 2023. To receive baseline rewards, the user should keep using the smart plug to measure the electricity consumption of a certain appliance.

All smart plug users share the offset rewards in proportion to their daily offsetting points. When the user offsets his energy consumption, a random number of offsetting points will be distributed to him. Basically, the more energy the user offsets, the more chances he has of receiving higher points. This mechanism is similar to GreenBTC.Club.

See User Guide for Arkreen Smart Plug for details.