Environment blog badge

Carbon and energy hack weekend: A geeky sleepover to save the planet

Participants camped out to build websites and apps to help people understand energy consumption. Here are a few creations from the event

Dozens of "geeks with a planetary conscience" recently gathered in the Guardian building for the inaugural carbon and energy hack weekend, co-hosted by Rewired State, 10:10, Carbon Culture and a handful of other organisations.

The brief was to use the available 30 hours – some participants camped all night – to create websites and apps that would help people, policymakers or organisations understand and reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions. Here are some of the results.

Are We Saving Energy in the UK?

Are We Saving Energy screenshot

This pleasingly simple website won the "best in show" prize. It pulls data from the balancing mechanism reporting system which monitors the national electricity grid to calculate whether the UK's electricity consumption is up or down relative to the same week in the previous year. The developers said they were aiming to create an energy-use equivalent to the stock-market updates that get read out at the end of TV news bulletins.


EV Finder screenshot

Winner of the visualisation prize, EVPointFinder is an iPhone app that maps electric vehicle charging stations. The user can drag a slider to set the range of their own vehicle to quickly see where they might get stuck. Developer Michael Dales explains:

"As an avid motorcyclist, I'm aware I should switch to an electric motorcycle, but if I did so how far would I be able to go? [EVPointFinder] uses scavenged data from two of the prominent companies installing points around the UK: Elektromotive and Pod Point. Elektromotive have a Google Map of all their charge points, which gives just a location. Pod Point goes one better by having real-time information in a private API as to what the state of their charge points are (available, in use, offline). I pulled these data sources together into an app that would help people with electric vehicles work out where and how far they can go."

Carbon Copies

Carbon Copies screenshot

Carbon Copies is the first incarnation of a CO2 guessing game that challenges you to estimate the carbon footprint of one item relative to another. How does an hour of watching TV compare with a bottle of water, or the whole of China compare with the whole of France? The data draws from a new database extracted over the weekend from How Bad Are Bananas? (the book that also forms the basis of our What's the carbon footprint of ... series). Carbon Copies scooped the weekend's carbon literacy prize.

Climate Change scoreboard

Openly Local 10:10 screenshot

One of the first creations of the weekend was an API (application programming interface) that allows web developers to build things around the database of organisations signed up to 10:10. The next day, the first use of the API was unveiled in the form of Climate Change scoreboard. It incorporates 10:10 sign-up status along with the other local-authority attributes listed on OpenlyLocal.

National Grid (aka Defra vs Salmon)

Defra Versus Salmon screenshot

The most leftfield creation of the weekend, this website presents the amount of CO2 saved by the government as part of their commitment to cut 10% of central government emissions in a year. But instead of just showing the savings a figure (which is what GovSpark does), this site frames them in terms of the carbon footprints of everyday items such as light bulbs and tea. In the developer's own words, it is:

"a quick, nasty-looking, badly coded hack created in the last half hour of the hack weekend. Compares the amount of carbon saved by government departments (from 1 October to 1 November) with other incredibly important stuff like beer and salmon."

Today's best video