Radical Collaboration and Blockchains for the Climate and Energy Transition
Martin Wainstein is a proud PhD graduate from the Climate & Energy College. In this seminar, he will share the work done over the last year, in founding and leading the Yale Open Innovation Lab (openlab) at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. The openlab produces and incubates open source projects that leverage emerging technologies and hold disruptive potential to help address planetary challenges. Particularly, Martin will share three incubated projects while discussing the overall merits and limitations of blockchain technologies in the climate and energy sector.
The three openlab projects he will share are: 1) OpenSolar, a peer-to-peer energy finance platform built on the Stellar blockchain that uses internet-connected sensors (IoT) and smart contracts for dis intermediation and contractual automation; a project he leads in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab that was inspired by the demise of the Puerto Rican electrical grid after the Irma and Maria hurricanes of 2017. 2) The EnergyAcademy, a virtual reality educational platform that explores the use of immersive technology to awaken meta connections in users through cross-scale navigations; for example in a journey following a photon from the sun to the thylakoid membrane of plant cells. And, 3) B-CAT (Blockchain for Climate Action Tracking), a proposal to collaboratively build an open platform to host global state and non-state climate registries; leveraging IoT & blockchain smart contracts for measuring, reporting and verifying (MRV) climate actions responding to the registries.
This seminar is part of a series of Energy Transition Hub events supported by the Victorian Clean Technology Fund (VCTF).
Martin is an Innovator-in-Residence at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, where he leads the development of the Yale Open Innovation Lab. He is also a research associate at the Yale department of Electrical Engineering, and a research affiliate at the Digital Currency Initiative of the MIT Media Lab. Martin did his PhD at the Australian-German Climate & Energy College in the University of Melbourne, Australia and holds an undergraduate degree from The University of Southern California where he focused on Geo and Astrobiology. Thinking holistically about big picture sustainability and translating this into innovative entrepreneurial action is by far what he enjoys the most!
After his undergraduate studies he returned to Argentina, his home country, to start a social enterprise that provides products and services for the low-carbon transition. As an entrepreneur, Martin has developed projects in renewable energies for the built environment, biofuel projects for large agriculture farms, forest conservation initiatives, marketing and corporate social responsibility campaigns for multinationals and established a network of sustainable architecture to engage in social innovation. Prior to starting his PhD in Melbourne, he co-founded a startup on wellness living in New Zealand. If he is not thinking about the planet, new social startups and the evolution of humankind, he’d rather be on a surfboard, snowboard, kitesurf or wakeboard. He likes to communicate his ideas through graphic design and visual art.