2020 SunContract Yearly Project Update: SunContract group total revenue surpasses 6 million EUR (7 million USD).

The year 2020 was metamorphic not only for us or the renewable energy sector but also the entire world. The pandemic affected various industries, and the renewable energy sector is no different. Despite the US Energy Information Administration’s prediction that electricity consumption would likely fall by 3.9% year-on-year in 2020, SunContract has emerged stronger than ever. In 2020, we achieved record sales and revenue in electricity sales and energy self-sufficiency products.

Since our birth in 2016, we have prioritized complete transparency with our existing and potential stakeholders and consumers, thereby enabling you to make sound and informed business and financial decisions.

In this yearly project update, we recap our performance in 2020 and how we have succeeded in achieving an upward growth trajectory even in these challenging times of COVID-19.

This project update highlights SunContract’s P2P energy trading and closed contracts for electricity, energy sustainable product revenue, the grant we received in the last year, and the development of the SunContract platform in 2020.

P2P energy trading

The previous year’s numbers, as we shared in the 2019 Project Year Update, were around 1,23 EUR (USD 1.5 million). While we were content with this figure, we wanted to do better. And we are proud to share that our electricity sales in 2020 amounted to an estimated EUR 2 million (USD 2.5 million), almost 50% up from the previous year.

Additionally, our clientele has grown approx. 40%. This includes renewable energy producers, energy consumers (industrial/commercial consumers and households), and prosumers.

In the 2019’s project update (published in 2020), we highlighted that we’re focusing on developing our service infrastructure to strategically scale our business. We were expecting a better growth projection for electricity contracts on our platform in 2020, and we’re glad to share that we have witnessed an impressive surge in energy contracts. The energy capacity contracts signed on SunContract almost tripled in 2020. The energy contracts amounted to around 30 GWh of renewable energy production. This included solar energy, hydro energy and cogeneration.

It’s essential to mention that our Electricity Management Portal has played an instrumental role in the growth of energy capacity contracts on our platform. During our quest to provide sustainable energy using blockchain, our platform encountered a few hurdles. These included lack of direct agreements, no sourcing of preferred renewable energy options, and more.

In response, we launched SunContract Electricity Management Platform in November 2019, which addressed all these hassles and provided an improved energy trading experience to both producers and consumers. After the update, we’ve witnessed a spike in the number of clients using our platform to trade electricity.

Furthermore, the option of transferring energy surpluses has been greatly appreciated by the prosumers. We have seen a twofold increase in the number of prosumers who produced and transferred their surpluses.

Energy sustainable Products Revenue

Developing self-sufficiency in energy production has been our priority, and we’re pleased to announce that we recorded a 100% surge in energy self-sufficiency products. These include solar power plants, heat pumps, EV chargers and other renewable energy systems.

In 2020, our sales in energy self-sufficiency products amounted to USD 4,500,000 (EUR 3,725,000), up from USD 2,250,000 (EUR 1,860,000) in 2019. These numbers show that our initiatives of bringing renewable energy to the mainstream are prevailing.

The sales are continuing to grow in 2021

SunContract is pleased to have closed out the first quarter of 2021 with a steady number of new projects taking off. Together with project partners, we have in Q1 of 2021 confirmed a total of 2.7 million EUR (3.4 million USD).

Highlights from Q1 2021:

· 150 new solar power plants sold

· Of the sold power plants, dozens of them decided to join the SunContract energy trading marketplace as producers and prosumers.

· Electricity contracts signing increased by 28%

· New customers who joined the SunContract platform increased by 10%

Received Grants

SunContract, along with its consortium of partners, raised almost USD 7 million for various research and development (R&D) projects. Of those, two projects Betai Project and Bright Project have been the most prominent.

Here’s a brief overview of the two projects.

Betai Development Project

The objective of the Betai Project is to demonstrate the positive business effects of blockchain technology and P2P energy trading, along with its fusion with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to facilitate automated trading.

In 2019, we received around EUR 2 million (USD 2.363 million) from the European Regional Development Fund and Ministry of Economy for this R&D project. The project is likely to run for 3 years, of which 2 years have been completed. During this time, we have successfully achieved two primary goals of the project:

• Setting up a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) system for energy projects
• Leveraging AI to locally optimize and automate the management of energy devices

The remaining project is scheduled to be completed in the year 2022.

Bright Development Project

In November 2020, SunContract, along with SONCE our Slovenian partner was selected for an R&D project amounting to €4,659,682 ($5.5 million USD). The project was supported by the EU Horizon 2020 for research into how a combination of blockchain technology tools and multi-value service design can boost community-level consumer engagement.

In less than a year, SunContract has made substantial progress on the Bright Project. We’ll be working with 16 project partners from 7 different countries Italy, Belgium, Romania, Netherlands, Greece, Estonia and Slovenia. The project has successfully started and is likely to be finished by 2023.

Development of the SunContract Platform in 2020

Today, the SunContract platform has 7,000+ users, including energy producers, prosumers, and consumers, ranging from small households to commercial facilities and industrial customers as well.

We decided to upgrade and redesign our platform to cater to a broader member base. We invested a significant amount of our revenue in R&D to introduce new services and functionalities.

In September 2020, we upgraded the existing invoicing system to increase transparency and provide in-depth insights. The latest version comes with additional features, such as improved billing overview, currency preference information, new marketplace savings feature, consumption by metering points, and concluded agreements on the platform.

These features enable members to get a clear picture of how much electricity they bought on the platform, the price at which they purchased, and their savings.

At the end of the year, we launched a new, more intuitive, and user-friendly website. The website provides more information and functionalities.

In the last quarter of the year, we started with the redesign of the platform to improve its performance as well as functionality. We started with the upgrade based on the event driven architecture to enable normal operation/usage of the platform for up to 1 million users by upgrading AI and Machine learning algorithms.

Because we have a microstructure design architecture, we started with the upgrade of individual microservices in order to improve the speed of the platform and some functionalities of coverage on P2P energy market place.

HQ SunContract office and SNC token development

In December 2019, we opened a new operational office in Estonia. We chose Estonia for our office because it is the most welcoming country in the EU when it comes to digital development. The country’s legislation is supportive of crypto and blockchain. Thus, we decided to shift our office to Estonia to expand our energy services.

As mentioned in the previous year’s project update, we were in the final stage of the licensing process. We are glad to announce that we are now approved for the Estonia license that will enable us to operate as an exchange — fiat to crypto and crypto to fiat and as well to provide e-wallet services for virtual currencies i.e., providing custodial services of the required credentials to access the virtual currencies.

In addition, we would like to mention the growth of SNC market value. The SNC token value increased from US 0.017 to USD 0.049 in 2020, exhibiting 2.8-fold increase in value.

The SNC token is listed on the following exchanges:

HUOBI: The second-largest crypto exchange in the world with a revenue of EUR 54 million (USD 65.9 million) per year.

OKEX: World-leading exchange with a revenue of EUR 23 million (USD 28 million) per year.

KRIPTOMAT: Estonia-based crypto exchange that allows direct SNCEUR contracts.

UNISWAP: Decentralized exchange with SNCETH pair to swap SNC tokens with ETH.

HITBTC: Advanced crypto exchange since 2013.

YOBIT: Panama-based cryptocurrency exchange.

A Word from CEO — Gregor Novak

While 2020 was a challenging year for the world, for SunContract, it was full of opportunities. Though most of our operations were facilitated remotely, installations had to be on-site. But thankfully, we were prepared for such a situation and were able to respond to the pandemic really well.

As a result, we achieved record numbers in 2020, even in expanding our group, where we have doubled our team size to 35 employees.

We plan to continue the growth trend as we aim at a 100% increase of the revenue in 2021. We are pleased with the major upgrade of our P2P energy marketplace where the speed of platform functionality has increased more than 10x times. Our focus in 2021 will be the global development of enabling service where people can purchase tokens SNC with BTC and EUR through the future SunContract app.

Our vision is to offer flexibility services like demand response which will be ran by AI technology and optimise renewable energy sources usage with additional savings. We are deeply involved with the best professionals within the HORIZON project and local partners with a strong aim to serve domestic and international markets.

Finally, we are introducing advanced services and products in the EV charger and energy storage battery field, which will support our core business which is a P2P energy marketplace with a blockchain background.

Register on the SunContract platform today, and in case of any queries, feel free to get in touch with us on the Telegram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Reddit.