Utility Data Hackathon Wrap up - December 2023
Last week, six teams from around the world joined our virtual hackathon to build new products on top of instant utility data, provided by Bayou. After just 24 hours of building we had some very cool ideas ranging from products advising on energy markets and home upgrades to tools looking to infer appliance information from energy usage.
A big thank you to Ben Eidelson and Stepchange for co-hosting, Dasha Cherepennikova, Dhanur Grandhi, Ross Gruber, Shawn Xu and Yin Liu for judging the final demos, and to Ari Steinberg, Arthur Shwab, Anay Shah, Nathan Eidelson, Ben Getson and Luke Squire for mentoring teams!
Read on to see what was built! Watch the hackathon demos here 👇
Submissions
Grid Link - Energy Markets robo advisor (🥇 1st Place and 🎨 Most Creative)
Team: Lyon Lay and Ross Carvalho
Watch Grid Link’s demo here 👇 | Slides
Monetizing devices in energy markets is hard. To get paid for market participation consumers and businesses must navigate challenges such as disparate markets (utility demand response programs and wholesale markets in each region of the US) in addition to location and availability of the device itself.
To cut through this complexity, Grid Link created a chatbot that uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Bayou’s API to answer the question “How can I make money from energy programs? I live in San Francisco and have a Tesla Powerwall battery and Nest thermostat.”
The chatbot first recommended Pacific Gas and Electric’s Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP) , a form of demand response which compensates consumers $2 for every kilowatt hour of energy reduced during a demand response event. Then, based on the consumer’s utility data, they were given an estimated earning opportunity of $439.40 for market participation from May to October.
Team Energy Insights - Automatically detecting energy appliances and usage patterns to identify opportunities for electrification and cost savings. (🥈2nd Place)
Team: Ben Jedlovec and Sam Kortchmar
Watch Team Energy Insights’s demo here 👇| Slides
While #ElectrifyEverything is a common mantra within the climate community, stakeholders such as utilities, electricians, homeowners and machine manufacturers need to understand which machines within households and businesses need electrification.
Enter Team Energy Insights who created a solution to leverage utility data to automatically detect home appliances and usage patterns to identify opportunities for electrification and savings. For the hackathon they created powerful data visualizations of 15 minute energy usage interval data to make it easy to look for energy signatures in interval gas and electricity usage.
Trends detected included smart thermostats kicking on heat pumps, solar panel production during daytime and level two electric vehicle charging.
In the demo, 15 minute interval data from Pacific Gas and Electric in San Francisco also specifically called out another instance of level two EV charging and a reduction in energy usage on 4/20/2023. Based on the data the demo recommended an EV electrician to improve the charging output which had degraded and offered an easy way to get solar panels with assistance from EnergySage. Check out the live demo yourself here.
Team Join Install - Enabling residential energy improvement projects ( 🥉3rd Place)
Team: Erick Salvatierra, Alexandre Toudret, Nick Kelly, Richard Cole, Mike Cozart, Brice Hutchings and Jordan Bain
Watch Team Join Install’s demo here 👇
The average US house is 47 years old representing a significant opportunity for energy efficiency upgrades. Although the home upgrade value proposition makes sense on paper, homeowners face significant challenges in managing the upgrade process. From challenges managing contractors to upgrade financing and properly sequencing upgrades, there exists an opportunity to provide a great experience around energy upgrades for homeowners. INSTALL is the mobile app that links owners and renters to HVAC and Energy Efficiency pros for instant energy profiles, connecting auditors, and delivering real-time renovation benefits.
For the hackathon, Team Install showed off a slick command line interface which asked a homeowner several basic questions such as their zip code, home square footage, who their electric and gas utility was, then finally to authenticate their utility account.
The demo then shared a Zydeco music playlist for enjoyment while analyzing the homeowner’s utility data and recommended home upgrades that would result in $417.72 and 7033.89 lbs of CO2 emissions yearly including insulation upgrades, sealing air leaks, installing energy efficient windows and a programmable thermostat.
In the future, this application could be adapted to show a payback cycle for the recommended upgrades backed by a more robust building efficiency model that incorporates inputs like current household windows, roof age or how large the building envelope is.
Green Pulse - Unlock your energy consumption carbon footprint.
Team: Laura Xu, Ashley Smith, Stephen Suffian, Luis Barrueco and Bastian Gerstner
For individuals there’s very little actionable help for reducing carbon emissions in their personal lives. To kick off this journey, Green Pulse helps consumers understand their carbon emissions from home energy usage and builds a plan to make acting on this data easy.
Team Green Pulse was a global team featuring members from Argentina, Taiwan, United Kingdom and the USA. First they created a workflow for consumers to share their email, utility and to authenticate their utility account.
After authentication, the energy consumption data was received at a webhook endpoint and paired with electric grid carbon intensity data from the Energy Information Administration for visualization in a next.JS dashboard.
The dashboard features included showing users daily energy usage and emissions from the last day, notes to drive action as well as a leaderboard for gamification amongst peers. These peer groups could be friends and family, neighbors or even co-workers within a company sustainability action plan.
In the future this dashboard could provide recommendations to help users climb the leaderboard 💪 or partner with local vendors for rewards like free coffee for motivating user action.
Arken - Optimize solar subscriptions with ongoing energy analytics
Team: Clara Zou, Zephyr Headley, Omar Ali and Akhil Gupta
Watch Arken’s demo here 👇
Community solar is a subscription for Americans who can’t put solar on their roof offering 5-30% utility bill savings without any upfront costs or hardware installation commitment. Often these subscriptions are sized manually or incorrectly resulting in painful operations work, a poor customer experience and lost savings for customers.
Arken used Bayou’s instant utility data API and AI to understand a community solar subscriber’s energy usage in kWh and automate subscription sizing. Overtime as a consumer’s energy usage changes, Arken would automatically upgrade the subscription size to ensure maximum savings from solar energy.
With more time, Team Arken would have liked to use the customer’s physical address to verify their eligibility for a specific solar farm and build out a more robust workflow for consumers to subscribe to a solar farm. In general Arken is B2B working to serve community solar companies who have dedicated teams manually reading utility bills and sizing consumer solar subscriptions.
Team Toronto - Making energy usage within buildings smarter
Team: Jennifer Turliuk and Mike Rose
Watch Team Toronto’s demo here 👇
Optimizing building energy use can significantly reduce a building’s utility bills and carbon emissions. Team Toronto showed us a demo that surfaced energy data for visualization and painted the picture for device control to unlock those energy opportunities. In their proof of concept household load data was disaggregated without any additional hardware (e.g. smart panel) and with minimal user input.
This enables households to change behavior of when/how they use appliances and prioritize which appliances should be upgraded. Through their energy efficiency dashboard, they provided users with a quick analysis of their energy usage patterns and offered recommendations for improving efficiency. The dashboard utilized Bayou API data for utility usage and could integrate with other complimentary APIs and hardware for enhanced insights.
