Luminary

Inspiration

Our team kept hearing that "clean energy" was the future without any real digital infrastructure to back it. So we took it to the neighborhood level, piloting off of the simple 40 neighborhood home in Summerlin we once walked through with the same hopes that drove Luminary to its creation.

What it does

Luminary is a real-time solar grid simulator built directly for residential neighborhoods. The interface pulls location-specific solar data, such as peak sun hours, temperature, and seasonal variation, and simulates how a neighborhood generates and stores energy across any timeframe, ranging from a single day to a full decade. Our AI scoring system tracks efficiency in real time, flags underperforming homes that could be bad for business, and streamlines actionable recommendations so communities can actually optimize toward an energy independent utopia.

How we built it

We built Luminary using VSCode as our IDE, which let us move from concept to full working demo. The frontend is React with live animated charts, an interactive US to state to neighborhood drill-down map, as well as a real-time event log. Solar generation data is modeled against real Las Vegas climate parameters from 2024, using the Featherless AI API for efficiency tracking.

Challenges we ran into

We never would have expected modeling realistic energy behavior to be so difficult: solar generation curves, battery charge/discharge cycles, and demand fluctuations all had to reach simulation standards without access to live data. Getting the simulation to run smoothly at 10x speed while keeping the charts animated and responsive was a technical issue that we still ended up having to leave 90% fixed. We also had trouble trying to make the UI readable at a glance, especially for judges who aren't prolific energy engineers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're especially astonished by our ability to deploy the drill-down solar map, going from the entire United States all the way down to a specific Las Vegas neighborhood. We're also proud that the simulation actually teaches people something: one can watch battery storage save the neighborhood during a cloudy afternoon and understand immediately why the process is vital to a utopia.

What we learned

Energy independence at scale for a utopian society is an IT problem as much as it is an engineering problem. The hardware clearly exists, but what's missing is a clear, home-by-home interface to measure performance at scale.

What's next for Luminary

We hope to implement real-time data integration and scale out to more cities across the U.S. and the globe by pooling and scraping weather feeds, utility rates, and household consumption profiles. In the long-term, we envision Luminary to be a tool for HOAs, city planners, and solar panel installers to screen neighborhoods for clean energy potential before a single panel breaks ground.

Built With

• featherless.ai
• netlify
• react