Sete

Awards & Nominations

Sete has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

APOLO

High-Level Project Summary

APOLO is an application created with the idea of providing valid and reliable information about the acquisition of solar panels and data about solar information on your area based on NASA's POWER API.Taking as an example, a regular citizen who lives in a city where it is hot most of the day, has his own house, has exorbitant energy expenditures, even knowing little about energy and knowing their existence, the fear of not having a return because not understand technical data, they end up making decisions to not purchase solar panels. We develop the mockup to create the app, and research the way to pull data with requisitions from POWER.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IxVQB4joA4aPHMn_Rhh2X4icvL0xwso_/view?usp=sharing

Link to Final Project

https://xd.adobe.com/view/d24a4acb-5540-4dd5-8d45-a347c2dfb0b7-8719/

Detailed Project Description

Brazil is experiencing the worst water crisis recorded in the last 91 years. We discovered that 90% of Brazilians want to generate solar energy at home, but still don't do it. We searched why and we found that people are afraid to make a bad investment, don't know much about the specific benefits of solar energy usage and don't really understand the information available online like NASA's.

Our project resulted in a simple visualization app to see if it's worth having solar panels in a specific region with secure data from NASA's Power API.

First, users inform: their location, which solar panel they aim for or currently use (as well as how many panels they have/intend to buy) and their current energy usage. The location coordinates are sent to NASA's POWER API, which returns solar irradiance data from over the years. That data is shown to users in a simple and understandable way. We created a screen to show a region's irradiance efficiency by season of the year so that users can understand if investing in solar energy is a good or bad deal, and, with calculations carried out on the solar panels, how much energy can be generated over the months.

This way, users can compare this information with their current energy expenditure and easily conclude which source is most profitable, the app also informs how quickly it is possible to get a return over the initial investment. APOLO gathers information about the main solar panel agencies close to the informed location, as well as their contact details, saving research time and allowing users to contract a qualified service.

The major benefits of this solution are: secure and reliable data information in a user-friendly way; intelligence that helps the decision-making process; the user is in the control of the hole process and have the power to compare solar panels, specific regions and solar panel companies;

The prototype was created using Adobe XD. We manually calculate the data shown in the prototype, and for that we choose the region of São Carlos, São Paulo - Brazil and the solar panel JINKO JKM400M-72H-V.

We hope that the information provided by the app (in an organized, intuitive and understandable way) can make it possible to increase the number of people buying solar panels and by consequence, saving money and helping the environment.

Space Agency Data

We use data from POWER/ Data Access Viewer. Containing meteorology and solar energy related parameters formulated to evaluate and design a renewable energy system, we focus on solar measurement. Using a user input location, we can provide processed data based on years and years of information collected by POWER, helping to make decisions and improve one's life.

Accessing POWER website, we used the renewable energy community and temporal average of the climatology of the last few years, usually the last 5, to give ourselves a good margin of the local climate. We also used the parameters of all types of sky shortwave downward irradiance, the midday insolation incident and wind speed.

The calculation of the generated energy is given by the solar panel, taking into account the power of the panel, the irradiation of the location, and the wind speed, at different times of the year and then we can calculate the average energy generated in different months to show in the easiest way to the user.

Hackathon Journey

Our experience in the Space Apps Experience could be described in one word: challenging. With that experience we learned:

New subjects we wouldn't otherwise be curious to explore if not for the hackathon;
How to collaborate with a team in order to create a solution with a meaningful purpose;
People with different backgrounds approach the same problem in many different creative ways.
About how to use the available data in API Power of NASA to simplify common challenges.
That solar panels are hard to understand.

We're a group of three people with the aim to bring simple information about solar energy for Brazilians. Our main motivations can be summarized in 2 things:

Brazil is experiencing the worst water crisis recorded in the last 91 years, with rainfall shortages, low levels of reservoirs and greater demand for energy due to the reactivation of the economy to pre-pandemic levels in several sectors. (The biggest source of electric energy in brazil are hydroelectric plants).
Brazil has an advantage due to the extensive energy potential from solar energy, considering that the levels of solar incidence are higher than those of countries that develop photovoltaic projects more frequently, such as Germany, France and Spain.

This scenery shows us that now, more than ever, we should invest in alternative, more sustainable and profitable sources of energy and the best alternative for our country lies on the solar energy.

References

Global Judging

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.

São Carlos-SP | You Are My Sunshine