EBits Energy Trading Platform takes home $3k

Why did you come to the hackathon?
Four of the team members have worked together for a while building all kinds of software applications and systems and we knew we were onto something with the idea. We love building software that tackles challenging problems. We were lucky to find an amazing and business-savvy 5th member of the team in Daniel.

Why did you build EBits?
The idea evolved from early conversations about a way to engage residential customers in a “game” that incentivises good practices for energy consumption. Quickly we realized that adding the “money” component to the idea was the way to go, and this is how the Ebits energy trading platform was born. Imagine a customer who can immediately capitalize on the investment to install solar panels or energy storage on her house by buying energy at a lower rate and reselling it at a higher one.
We believe that a platform like Ebits is the future for effective and flexible energy distribution.

How did you build EBits?
The LabVIEW graphical programming language is at the backend, running the exchange server and the logic for each node. LabVIEW is also in charge of interacting with UtilityAPI to obtain data for a specific node and report it to the client. At the front end, a combination of AngularJS and D3.js are in charge of the user experience. The bridge between LabVIEW and JS is a combination of a RESTful API and websockets.

How did you use UtilityAPI? What was the experience like?
From the LabVIEW backend we query UtilityAPI to obtain the “interval” data - which is to say the meter information collected. We are looking at the energy consumption (kWh count) for each time interval and are using that in our calculations as well as displaying it to the user.

Overall the experience was very rewarding. It was easy to pick up and get integrated with our system and the guys at UtilityAPI were very helpful in getting us the resources we needed to get started.

What advice would you give to others who may attend a cleanweb hackathon?
Do it! You’ll learn so much by just listening to other people’s experience and thoughts. Being immersed in the world of renewable energy will ignite new ideas and expand your worldview.

Team members and their background 

• François Normandin, Systems Architect at JKI, extensive experience in architecting software for renewable energy projects (energy storage, PV manufacturing, etc).
• Javier Ruiz, Senior Engineer at JKI, experience developing embedded control systems for projects in renewable energy and power distribution.
• Danielle Jobe, Project Engineer at JKI, experience developing software for automation and test for energy storage and PV manufacturing applications.
• Andrés Viesca, Full-Stack developer with experience developing apps for many different industries. This was his first time in the renewable energy space (and he loved it!).
• Daniel Sherwood, President and Co Founder at PVComplete.

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Anything else?
The diversity among the attendees to the hackathon was inspiring - people from different backgrounds, ages, and countries coming together to literally try to make the world a better place. Kudos to SunCode event organizers!