DIPPER

Dashboard UI

Inspiration

Climate change is real, CO2 levels are rising, and the effects are becoming more obvious every day. Clean energy is one of the most important solutions we have to combat this, but actually getting those projects built is still surprisingly hard.

One of the biggest bottlenecks is interconnection which is the application & review process of connecting new energy projects to the electricity grid. Today, clean energy developers often deal with opaque interconnection queues where it’s hard to know where you stand, how long things will take, or what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

We built DIPPER to explore how blockchain could bring more transparency and trust to that process by creating a clear, verifiable record of when applications are submitted and how the queue is ordered.

What it does

DIPPER is a decentralized application that simulates an interconnection queue for energy projects.

When a developer submits an application through MetaMask, the blockchain records a simple proof of submission: their wallet address and timestamp. That ensures the queue order can’t be tampered with.

On top of that, we built a dashboard that makes the data readable and useful. It combines on-chain data with user-provided form details like project name, size, and location, so you can actually understand what each application represents in real time..

How we built it

We built DIPPER using a hybrid Web3 stack: *Smart contracts (Hardhat) store submission proofs (wallet + timestamp) *Ethers.js connects the frontend to the blockchain *Next.js (TypeScript) powers the frontend UI and dashboard *MetaMask handles wallet connection and transaction signing

The smart contract keeps things minimal on-chain, while the frontend handles all the flexible application data. That separation helped keep the system both simple and scalable.

Challenges we ran into

"Wow it works the first try", a line we never had the pleasure of saying during this hackathon. Working with blockchain comes with its fair share of challenges and some of the main issues we ran into were: *MetaMask transaction issues and nonce errors on a local network. *Keeping the frontend in sync with blockchain updates *Combining on-chain data with off-chain form inputs cleanly *Making auto-refresh work without the UI feeling laggy or jumpy *Debugging contract connections and network configuration issues

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even with those challenges, we managed to build a functioning dApp system. Some of the accomplishments we are proud of are: *Users being able to submit blockchain transactions through MetaMask *Having the queue updates in real time on a clean dashboard *We successfully combined on-chain verification with the off-chain application data *We built sorting, status simulation, and a responsive UI to demo

What we learned

This project taught us a lot about how Web3 actually behaves in practice, not just in theory.

We learned things like: *How blockchain transactions work in practice (and why they sometimes fail) *Why frontend data has to wait for blockchain responses *How to design around storing only what’s necessary on-chain *How to connect MetaMask smoothly with a frontend app *How to quickly build and debug a full-stack Web3 app under time pressure

What's next for DIPPER

We want to expand DIPPER beyond just queue transparency into a more intelligent and collaborative interconnection system. The goal is to make the platform not only show where applications are in line, but also help improve how the grid itself is planned and used.

Some ideas we’re exploring:

*Adding a way to score grid congestion risk to help developers pick better locations *Letting developers pool resources for shared infrastructure upgrades *Crowdsourcing real-time grid data through a marketplace to improve visibility

The goal is to take something that is currently slow and opaque, and slowly turn it into something more collaborative, data-driven, and efficient for clean energy deployment.