State Department #CleanEnergyHack: Working with Silicon Valley to Bring Renewable Energy to the Next Billion
Over 1 billion people around the world lack access to electricity and another billion lack access to reliable electricity. Providing access to energy can enable progress across the education, health, social, and economic sectors. Innovative and scalable solutions are needed to meet the drastically rising demand for electricity across the developing world, as well as the urgent imperative to significantly reduce global carbon emissions. One of the primary challenges is a lack of adequate financing for distributed energy projects — particularly from the private sector. A leading barrier to stimulating private finance is often a lack of access to reliable, real-time data and analysis about the country’s renewable energy development potential.
Companies and developers are also be hesitant to do business in countries that don’t have or provide information necessary for identifying renewable energy sites. They may be unable to afford conducting assessments themselves. And current methods for assessments, when conducted, can take months or years to assess where to complete.
On April 1–2, 2017, the U.S. State Department teamed up with the World Bank, Booz Allen Hamilton, and GalvanizeSF to host a data science competition to explore whether layering diverse data sets can help map a country’s development potential in a few days in what would otherwise take months with traditional methods. The event was part of the State Department’s Silicon Valley Tech Challenge, a series of events and initiatives to engage leading innovators on new to approaches to expanding access to clean energy around the world.
The test-case for the competition was Burma, a country of 56 million that voted to let go of military rule in 2011, but its transition to democracy and a stable economy is stymied by the fact that only 35 percent of inhabitants have access to electricity. In rural areas, the estimated number drops to 16 percent.
Here is the Starter Kit, explaining the challenge in depth and setting the parameters for the competition:
Over 120 designers, front-end developers, data scientists, and energy experts spent all weekend creating mobile-based applications, GIS tools for mapping, and sophisticated algorithms to tackle the challenge. Over 15 teams presented diverse pitches to a panel of judges hailing from government, start-ups, finance, and civil society. All 15 presentations are available here.
The winning team was Cartesian Project, a clean energy knowledge management platform that allows users to visualize data, extract deep insights, and contribute their own data to drive to clean energy development around the globe. It creates interactive maps, combines data sources, exports data to APIs that can be applied to geo-models, and creates an open data marketplace that facilitates for greater collaboration.
And the competition is now open to the rest of the world, with an $8,500 prize challenge announced today on crowdsourcing innovation platform HeroX.
