CrowdSolar

What it does

We at CrowdSolar want to change the way the world invests in clean solar energy. We match investors with land owners who offer just the right piece of land. Solar Projects in developing countries close to the equator not only promise a higher return of investment, but also enables these countries to develop faster and to be more sustainable.Where ever you are looking for a solar project, even if it is in your own country, because you life in that small rented flat but still care about the environment, or if you really want to get these returns up to 200% in 10 years by investing in Jamaican projects. It’s up to you! The social part is very important for us. Our platform is not only about financial returns, but we also want to encourage investors to build their panels in countries close to the equator, for sustainability reasons, because they are more efficient and developing countries often rely a lot on fossil fuels, so there will be more emissions saved in the end. And also for social reasons: it enables poorer people living cheaper, starting a business and being more independent. To show our commitment a more sustainable and fairer world, 5% of our future earnings will be donated in social solar-panel projects.

How we built it

We build it in a small Team of 4 Persons during the //Slash Hackathon 2019 and built the website with React. Ou backend is based on a custom-written PHP-API and mySQL. Two of us were responsible for the software engineering from the very beginning on, while one of us worked on the formula we need, to develop dynamic algorithms regarding the specific countries. The forth person early on worked on concept related important questions but later switched to software engineering as well.

Challenges we ran into

• difficult mathematics to determine the angle of the solar systems depending on latitude and day
• 2 times change the programming language (javasprict -> pyton -> php), because of compatibility problems
• Conceptual questions, we could solve in 24 hours and know only have ideas on how to solve them. (e.g. liability and regulations in the specific countries).
• The programming parts where overwhelming much and so we needed to really focus on the core functionality and not the nice features we had planned initially.

What's next for CrowdSolar

1. Develop Prototype, launch several landingpage tests.
2. Organise the first pilot projects.
3. Getting funding and scale the company

Table number

H1

Built With

• javascript
• php
• react
• sql