Energyhack 2020 by Stromnetz in Engelnest

The 5th version of the Energyhack Hackathon was hosted in our coworking on September 25th and 26th, in a hybrid event with onsite and remote participation due to COVID-19. With the tagline STADT * ENERGIE * VERKEHRSWENDE (City, energy & traffic) we saw diverse projects develop with open data from the energy sector in order to create potential solutions for Berlin’s energy networks, electricity, mobility and energy transition.Collectively organized by StromnetzBerlin, Open Knowledge Foundation and the Senatsverwaltung für Wirtschaft, Energie und Betriebe under the umbrella of the WindNODE project, the event gathered 50 participants in total. During 24 hours they developed projects both at Engelnest and remotely for the following challenges:

Traffic change in Berlin: How would a good compromise look like?
Berlin as a resilient city – How do we prepare for the future?
Climate protection, energy and the environment – How do we shape the energy transition in the city?
For Energyhack, Stromnetz Berlin planned a budget of 30,000 euros as part of WindNODE to support the development of projects with potential for the energy transition, helping from the initial idea to the finished prototype and functioning demo. Keep reading to discover which are the projects we could soonly be developed!

• Traffic change in Berlin: How would a good compromise look like?
• Berlin as a resilient city – How do we prepare for the future?
• Climate protection, energy and the environment – How do we shape the energy transition in the city?

For Energyhack, Stromnetz Berlin planned a budget of 30,000 euros as part of WindNODE to support the development of projects with potential for the energy transition, helping from the initial idea to the finished prototype and functioning demo. Keep reading to discover which are the projects we could soonly be developed.

Winners of each challenge:
The winner of the first challenge was BERouting, an intermodal routing planner for Berlin, based on digitransit.

At the moment of the hackathon, BERouting included public transport, bicycles, cars and bike-sharing (linked together as well), while also showing e-charging stations. This is only possible if the corresponding data is available as OpenData.

The team also found some data gaps as Berlin does not seem to have obliged the scooter providers to make their data available to the city as MDS and publicly as GBFS. Therefore, they couldn’t integrate scooter providers like nextbike, which is already working in other cities. They also said they “could have incorporated live data from car park occupancy if it would have been available”.

Behind BERouting is a cross-municipal team from Ulm and Berlin formed by Stefan, Constantin, Maxi and Karl were involved. Congratulations! We look forward to seeing the development of this project!

For the second challenge of Berlin as a resilient city, the winner project was Rettet die Berliner Rettungsringe (Rescue the Berlin Lifebuoys) by Gerhard Peter. The idea is to make possible to report via a QR code and an app every time a lifebuoy ring is missing from its placement around Berlin, and in a future to use LoRaWan low-power protocol to notify any changes on their position as an energy-efficient solution.The winning project of the third challenge was PV Dashboard which team, consisting of Charlotte and Joachim, has developed an educational visualization with researched and opened study data with the goal of providing a reliable database for research and analysis of Berlin’s energy generation and demand as a whole and segmented by district. They also aim to display further capacities of solar-suitable areas in Berlin in different scenarios and different weather years, answering to questions as “How does the temporal structure of electricity consumption differ between districts?“ and „Where and when does an unused overproduction of solar electricity often occur?“. We congratulate the winners for what can be a great contribution to the energy transition in Berlin!

At Engelnest we are happy and proud to have hosted in our space the Energyhack 5th version in a successful and safe event during COVID-19, aligning with the local regulations.

Here you can see all the projects that were part of Energyhack 2020.

Photographies by Leonard Wolf – CC-BY 4.0 Energyhack. See full gallery here.