SOLAyes [PHAMics]

Screenshot of our main screen

Inspiration

In 2021, energy markets began to tighten because of a variety of factors, including the extraordinarily rapid economic rebound following the pandemic. But the situation escalated dramatically into a full-blown global energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The price of natural gas reached record highs, and as a result, so did electricity in some markets. Oil prices hit their highest level since 2008. Higher energy prices have contributed to painfully high inflation, pushed families into poverty, forced some factories to curtail output or even shut down, and slowed economic growth.

A promising solution to the energy crisis is the new sustainable energy production technologies that enable us to generate electricity from the sun, wind, and water. However, these energy sources are by their nature heavily dependent on the time of day, leading to a mismatch in the market between available energy and needed energy by the time of day. Since storing the extra energy is not always feasible and losing it is not rational, a solution is required to find a better energy-balancing approach.

What it does

The goal of our submission is to raise awareness of this important issue. A possible solution to this problem is the so-called "peak shaving", meaning how to distribute the energy usage from a few single peaks to the overall day, relieving the energy grid and reducing the necessary amount of generated energy from fossil fuels.

This approach includes two major elements: (1) Creating a simple way to educate people about rebalancing their energy consumption based on natural time-specific energy production constraints; (2) Creating a multi-agent asynchronous platform to enable trading energy;

Our app aims to deliver this energy-balancing knowledge in a gamified approach so that people are motivated to try out the web app and learn from it while also creating an actual platform for trading energy with the network based on users' in-game decisions.

How we built it

We build our web app in two big parts: a server-side component written in NodeJS and a client-side component written in React.js. The server-side component is responsible for data persistence and communication with MongoDB, as well as our trading logic. Our client-side component displays our web page and integrates the game with our own Game Engine written in TypeScript. The gamification part is achieved by using Human Pose Detection Deep Learning models and several UI features. We set up a CI/CD pipeline in order to easily and continuously deliver/test our web app, including Docker and MongoDB.

Challenges we ran into

Due to the intrinsic complexity of the problem and the fact that this web app was developed during a Hackathon, the main challenge / limiting factor was time. With a little bit more time, we could have easily refined our app a little bit more and made it more user-friendly and educational. Another problem was the quite huge codebase necessary for such a system, especially as the code was written with a focus on quick completion and not code quality. JavaScript and its flaws provided us with a lot of headaches during the development, especially in a real-time AR game engine scenario. Another challenge was writing the Game Engine and adjusting it to our needs - we encountered several problems with slow loading, computer crashes, and bugs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are super proud of our teamwork which helped us to achieve great results in a short amount of time. Without our team, this project would have not been possible. Our communication and teamwork helped to solve many encountered challenges and improve the user experience of our game. We are also proud of implementing our own Game Engine and integrating it with the idea of our game in a short amount of time, especially with the big tech stack we have implemented.

What we learned

The most important learning: Teamwork is the key. Being able to trust each other and communicate efficiently are probably the most important factors for a successful Hackathon team. Only with teamwork, a good idea can be brainstormed, and only with teamwork, it is possible to bring this idea to life. We also learned a lot about work prioritization - we have many great add-on ideas for our project, but the time constraints didn't allow us to implement them fully. We had to focus on the important features and prioritize our work. Furthermore, we learned a lot on the technology side via the AR scenarios and game implementation that we implemented in our web app.

What's next for PHAMics

We could imagine putting the last finishing touches on the app (small UI/UX improvements, stability, etc.) to improve the User Interface and User Experience. Furthermore, we would love to give everyone the opportunity to actually use the web app and therefore educate themselves on the very important topic of energy consumption as this issue is currently really important in the world we live in. By that, we hope to enable everyone to adapt their lifestyles in order to "peak shave" their energy consumption and therefore lead to better, more sustainable energy production.