Kilowhat

Inspiration

Everyone knows that if you need power, you just plug a cord into your wall or a USB into a port, but where does the electricity come from beyond that? Electricity is the one of the most, if not most, essential thing to modern society, yet very few of us know the true impacts and effects of its production. Climate change is a major problem facing our world today, and 25% of climate change emissions come from energy production. By understanding where our energy comes from, we can work towards lower emissions and more sustainable production.

What it does

Kilowhat allows users to explore their energy usage and compare it with usage around the world. You can explore trends across the world and various data points to see how energy usage and production affects the world around us. You can take a survey and see an estimate of how much energy you use.

How we built it

We used React and Node.js for the front end, and hosted it on GitHub Pages. For the backend, we wrote it in Python and used Flask to make our API. The backend was hosted on an Amazon EC2 box.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into was using maps as an input selection method. Using react-simple-maps gives us a map that can change color when hovered over, but didn't provide an easy way to extract and keep track of clicked states or countries. We had to implement that methodology ourselves which required learning more about controlled components in React.

Another was the finicky details that come with estimating energy consumption. We were able to find a few datasets, but it took work to get them into a form that we could use. Even then, estimating energy usage isn't a simple formula. We did our best to estimate major sources of energy consumption and find accurate values, but there's still improvements to be made.

Finally, our team wasn't all that familiar with React and some other libraries we used. This caused a bit of frustrating debugging, but we came out knowing a lot more than we did before. (Bless StackOverflow)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Like we said above, our team now had a lot more experience using React. One of our favorite things we were able to create was the use of a interactive map as an input method. This took a good amount of work from a few people to get it to work the way we wanted it to.

We're also proud of the data we collected and processed. We had to aggregate a few complex data sources to get the data for our project which took quite a few lines of code and a lot of time as well. In the end, we ended up with summarized data in a format more useful and cleaner too!

What we learned

We learned a lot about React in a practical sense. Things that we had seen in theory, we were now able to use and learn from in practice. It was rewarding when we were able to combine techniques we had learned to solve a problem in an elegant way.

We also learned a lot about how energy usage has changed. It was really interesting to see some of the spikes and dips and other features of how the world's energy usage has evolved.