Project Prophet

Inspiration

When faced with the question of green energy most peoples question is "Is this even possible?" And that is a fair question. When the actual facts of cost, reliability, and power efficiency aren't known you cant make any judgments on if green energy should be adopted, especially considering the inconsistency of green energy production. That's I built a tool to simulate a power plant with real data of energy demands, and weather conditions to put the facts in people's hands.

What it does

Power Prophet will take in specifications for a power plant, including how many solar panels are built, wind turbines, batteries, and coal power plants then it will simulate the power plant's production using real life data from weather reports and EIA.gov to put the powerplant to the test. It will show you how it fairs and when it has shortfalls in production.

How we built it

I first gathered data from EIA.gov and noaa.gov of power hourly power usage and hourly weather reports for Atlanta (although this process can be applied to anywhere) then we built a parser to put the data in a way for us to utilize in rust. Then we built a simulation engine that will calculate the energy production of the power plant given the weather conditions and returns the aggregated results. After this I built a website that would let a user submit a power plant design then be shown it's performance.

Challenges we ran into

I did not have a personal laptop so I had to use a computer lab PC, this provided a challenge because VSCode could not be ran, and when I tried using replit, or deepnote as an online IDE it had too weak of a VM to even be able to compile the Rust I wrote. This lead me to waste basically half the day trying to get my development environment set up, eventually I was able to setup an environment in gitpod.io. Then challenges were presented when I wanted to gather data sources, many data sources did not provide the data I needed or it would provide data in daily or monthly time steps. This lead me to go hunting across many different sources to get the one that could meet my demands of being in fine enough time steps while providing the data I needed to simulate wind resistance, solar DHI, and more.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of the fact I was able to accomplish this by my self, and that the final product was still functional despite the major hurdles I encountered in the process.

What we learned

I learned that no matter the challenge I face I can still overcome it, and that

What's next for Project Prophet

This tool could be fine and tuned to build out a simulation engine that would use AI to find the most efficient powerplant possible.

Built With

• axum
• chartjs
• css
• html
• javascript
• rust
• tokio