Aura

Stop overpaying. Start seeing clearly. Propane intelligence and solar planning for row-crop operations.

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What Is AURA?

AURA is a full-stack energy intelligence platform built for the agricultural ecosystem. Not just for farmers — for every party that touches farm energy.

For farmers — know when to buy propane, whether solar pencils out, and how much energy you'll need next month.

For propane suppliers — understand regional demand before it happens. Stop reacting. Start routing.

For energy companies — a live view into agricultural energy consumption patterns that doesn't exist anywhere else.

For solar providers — the ZenPower permit intelligence layer identifies farms with high solar feasibility and zero adoption.

That's not a market gap. That's a pipeline.

The Finding That Built This

We pulled 389 weeks of EIA propane pricing data and compared it directly against crude oil benchmarks. The markup above crude doesn't move with energy markets. It moves with harvest calendars.

September, October, November — the months when farms have to buy, markups run 14-15 percentage points above the rest of the year. Crude oil prices don't explain it.

This is a power imbalance. And it's been hiding in plain sight.

We called it the Gouge Index. Farmers deserve a word for what's been happening to them.

What We Built

  • Propane Advisor — Live EIA data cross-referenced against crude oil. A BUY / HOLD / WAIT signal with reasoning behind it.
  • Demand Forecast — 30, 60, and 90-day usage projections built from a farm's actual profile and crop type.
  • Solar Advisor — NREL PVWatts modeling + ZenPower permit map showing exactly what neighbors are already doing, with full USDA REAP and IRA grant calculations baked in.
  • 10-Year Energy Plan — Side-by-side cost modeling of doing nothing versus going solar and optimizing propane timing.
  • AI Voice Briefing — ElevenLabs-powered daily audio summary. A farm's energy status in 20 seconds.
  • Receipt Scanner — Upload a propane receipt. Gemini extracts price, gallons, supplier, and date, then benchmarks it against that week's EIA government price. Farmers find out instantly whether they got a fair deal.

Architecture

AURA runs a multi-agent Flask backend where each domain problem has its own dedicated agent:

  • Solar Advisor Agent → Solar savings and viability
  • Propane Cost Advisor → Market summary and recommendations
  • Buy Signal Agent → BUY / HOLD / WAIT decision output
  • Receipt Parser Agent → Gemini-powered OCR field extraction
  • Gouge Agent → Crude oil comparison and pricing analysis
  • Demand Forecast Agent → 30/60/90-day refill guidance
  • Voice Briefing Agent → ElevenLabs MP3 farm summary

Each agent is independently callable via the Flask API, allowing the React frontend to run advisors in parallel and compose results into a unified dashboard without any single agent becoming a bottleneck.

The separation also means each advisor fails gracefully. If one data source is slow, the rest still load. The operation never sees a broken page.

What We're Most Proud Of

The Gouge Index. It's an original analysis; we didn't find it in a paper, we found it in the data. 389 weeks of prices, compared against crude, broken down by month. The pattern is undeniable. Harvest months are expensive not because energy is expensive but because farms are captive buyers, and suppliers know it.

Naming it felt important.

Challenges

Real farm energy data is messy, multi-source, and siloed. We stitched together EIA, NREL PVWatts, ZenPower solar permits, and USDA ARMS into a single coherent advisory layer and made it feel simple enough to use from a tractor.

Balancing deterministic forecasts with LLM-generated narratives without contradiction was harder than expected. The numbers and the words have to tell the same story.

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