REgy - your digital Energycoach

Startbild
User Informationen
Verbraucherauswahl
PV-Anlage
Startansicht
Wochenplan
Wochenrückblick
Wochenrückblick
User
Ranking

Inspiration

Creating acceptance through knowledge. We want to achieve it by a completely new way of knowledge transfer to give people a feeling for energy and thus show them in the long term, how they can save in their household maximum energy and thus energy costs.

What it does

With the help of gamification, REgy manages to impart knowledge in the areas of renewable energies, regenerative energy technology and energy efficiency in a very simple way, while at the same time optimizing one's own consumer behavior in the household.

The innovation about REgy is that the entire app is completely customized for the user and thus provides individualized consumption suggestions for the household. Unlike weather forecasts, we calculate the prosumer's electrical produced power based on the location and orientation of its PV system. For this purpose, we use an API that provides us with a 14-day forecast of the solar irradiance on the horizontal surface. From this irradiation, converted to the inclined surface, the information of the user and the position of the sun, we can create a personalized generation profile of the prosumer. On the basis of this profile and the user's preferences, we can create optimal consumption windows for each user's household appliances.

The consumption suggestions are based on various factors, such as whether the user generates energy himself through PV or draws electricity from the electricity mix. In addition, when setting up the app, the user is asked which consumers are used in the household and whether certain routines exist (home office, number of washing cycles per week, etc.).

How we built it

Code: We used Flutter what is based on C#. The difference between Flutter and C# is that Flutter is mainly made for building applications.

Design: We used figma to design the app.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest struggles was, that our team consists of only 4 people - and one of them got sick after the first day. So we were basically a team of 3 and except of Emma, no one was able to code the app - and she never used flutter before. So we had to work very efficient and had to manage all of our tasks to the right people to get the job done in time.

While Emma was working on the code, Elli managed the app design, structure and tried to find the right data for the app in the energy sector. Timon also was searching for the right data for the app in the energy sector and took care of the topic of forecasting yields of the PV system and thus also an API interface. Timon and Elli have studied regenerative energy technology and therefore have no experience with designing an app or UI and UX.

Since we still wanted to be competitive, we quickly had to decide and accept that we needed to limit ourselves to a very small demo version, as we didn't had a chance to convert all our ideas into code in the short time available.

Another energy-sector related challenge we ran into, was to come up with a concept for forecasting the yields of a PV system in order to be able to make the most accurate consumption suggestions possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even with a smaller team than expected, we were able to launch a demo version of our idea. For sure its still not done yet, but we learned so much in this short time and still had a lot of fun doing so. Independent of the existing code, we were able to bring our idea on a whole next level which is making us really proud and thankful.

What we learned

Everyone of us was able to expand his own skills by a lot. Emma for example never worked with flutter and now she got a working demo version of our app. Elli learned how important it is, to focus on the very basics at first before working on details. Timon learned how to get the theoretical mathematical operations done for a prognosed based system. And we all learned, that with the right focus and ambition, you are able to get the job done even under "bad" circumstances (smaller team than excepted).