Hacking the future of renewable energy at the Qurrent Hackathon
So this happened….
It is no exaggeration to say that the Qurrent Hackathon was one of the most fun hackathons we have done. And the end results –the final prototypes and pitches– proved that everyone really worked their butts off too. But more about the results later!
Partnering up with Qurrent to hack the future of renewable energy
A few months ago Qurrent came to us with a very cool question.
‘We have a problem to solve and we’d like to do a hackathon, can you help us?’
(–Of course we can!)
Qurrent is a non-profit, renewable energy corporation that is trying to make the world a better place by reducing the use of fossil energy and stimulating the use of renewable energy by building their own wind and solar parks. Three years in a row they were voted by Greenpeace and the Consumer Association ‘the greenest energy company of the Netherlands’. Hell yes we wanted to work with them💚
The challenge: explaining the smart contract and influencing people’s energy usage
The energy field is changing. As more and more energy will come from solar panels and windmills, the energy prices will become more flexible and will change hourly depending on the weather. For this, Qurrent already offers the energy contract of the future, the so-called ‘smart energy contract’. It works with the principles of supply and demand. Is there a lot of green energy available? The rate goes down. Are the supplies low? The rate goes up. In theory when a perfect balance is reached, no green energy goes to waste and no extra fossil energy will be needed. But HOW can we create awareness, how can we make sure people understand this and are willing to change their behavior, in order to create a greener future with less CO2 emission?
That was the challenge.
The brainstorm
The contestants were a mixture of developers, designers and –most importantly– people from the Qurrent community with knowledge of or a special interest in the energy field. They offered the unique insights of real clients, which forced the developers to really think from a client perspective.
In six teams of five or six (or seven, in one case) they started bouncing off ideas of each other.
Hack-time!
After three hours of concepting, creating ideas, changing ideas and finally sticking with an idea, it was time to HACK. We hacked for five hours straight before we had dinner (🍕 and 🍣) AND we had two super inspiring talks from the immensely brave Wilco van Rooijen and the super cool Victor van Doorn. After that… More hacking!
There was a lot of this happening:
Also, we made sure everyone stayed awake by inviting the Red Bull ladies:
And then at 12 it was time for… A very intense nerf war. We bought no less than 1000 nerf darts and things got hectic. And yes, this is the product owner of Qurrent, who was obviously having a great time. (Together with us)
Meanwhile, some teams were hard to distract. Even with a nerf war. At this point, it was deep into the night. This picture from around 3AM speaks a thousand words: empty beer bottles, empty bags of sugary goods, empty coffee cups and only three team members left. A real hackathon.
The pitches
After another 9 hours of hacking (and maybe some sleep) –and a very interesting presentation of Lodewijk Hoekstra– it was time for lunch, pitch preparations and finally: the long-awaited pitches and demos.
It was impressive what the teams were able to accomplish in only two days. All the ideas showed a different solution to the problem, which was very cool too see. We’d like to highlight three concepts that were all really different in approach, were smart and looked amazing.
One team (Team 1) made this awesome prototype which they called Qlock. It shows people’s realtime energy usage and the energy rates by using lights in an epic looking clock.
Team 4 created and app called ‘Qforest’ which aims to create awareness and promotes good behaviour by means of a virtual forest. Your personal forest grows or slowly dies, depending on how well you are doing with your energy usage. If you pass certain challenges you are rewarded trees, bushes, etc. Eventually animals can start appearing in your forest. A really cool way of tracking your usage and creating awareness.
The winner is…
… Qgame! They focused on an interesting target group: kids and their parents. By teaching kids to deal with energy in a sustainable way and giving parents insight in their usage, this group really focused on the future. How they plan to teach kids? By using augmented reality and soccer players (note: Qurrent is main sponsor of Feyenoord so this could be combined with season tickets and other cool prizes for the families that do well).
The soccer players appear in the living room and tell the kids that something is using a lot of energy. It then sends the kids on a quest to find the object. If your mom tells you to turn off the tv or remember to close the fridge door, it doesn’t make as much impact as when your sport hero tells you to do it. So very clever!
Note that the TV is on fire to make the target audience aware! It is a strong concept and they deserved the very cool price of 10.000 kWh of energy!🎉 Congratulations!
Thanks everyone for the two amazing days! It gave us at Label A a lot of energy⚡️
Label A organizes hackathons together with clients because we like to solve problems that just don’t fit in a project. After hacking with Philips, Coca-Cola European Partners, PON (Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda, Porsche) and Qurrent we’re happy to talk about fixing the challenges of your brand. Don’t hesitate to call us and talk about it (0031 (20) 820 37 38 and ask for Bram).
