Energlee

Inspiration

The energy transition isn’t being held back by a lack of technology — it’s being slowed by confusion, fragmentation, and disengagement. For most everyday people, meaningful action feels inaccessible. Figuring out how to reduce your own energy footprint or engage with renewable energy projects requires time-consuming research across dozens of disconnected websites, dense technical documents, and hard-to-find public notices. At the same time, renewable energy projects and electrification efforts are frequently delayed or blocked not because communities oppose clean energy in principle, but because public engagement is inefficient and poorly structured. Energlee was inspired by this gap: the lack of a clear, accessible pathway for ordinary people to understand what’s happening in their community and take actions that actually matter. We asked: What if we took the guess work out of making a difference? What if people were shown the most relevant, high-impact actions they could take — right where they live?

What it does

Energlee is a personalized energy and civic action platform. Users enter a ZIP code and a few interests, and Energlee generates a prioritized task list of the most relevant, high impact actions they can take at home and in their community.

At the core is Enercomm, a local energy project hub that:

surfaces nearby renewable projects and policies
shows project timelines and milestones
centralizes key resources and notices
enables structured public Q&A with developers and stakeholders
uses polls and sentiment tools to make community support visible
provides AI summaries of technical documents in plain language
used Solana to authenticate the uploaded resources

How we built it

onboarding and localization (ZIP-based)
an action library plus an impact vs effort ranking system
Enercomm dashboards for project visibility, timelines, Q&A, and feedback
a document pipeline that ingests long PDFs and produces plain-language summaries tied to specific actions

Challenges we ran into

project and notice data is fragmented and inconsistent
summarizing technical and legal docs safely without overclaiming
designing engagement tools that feel fair and not biased
making civic participation feel lightweight instead of overwhelming

Accomplishments that we're proud of

turned “I care, what do I do?” into a clear, ranked action plan
made local projects easier to understand with timelines + plain-language summaries
built feedback tools that capture quiet support, not just organized opposition

What we learned

Most people do not need more information, they need a short list of actions that are local, doable, and clearly worth their time. And clean energy deployment depends as much on trust and communication as it does on technology.