Dirty Watts

Team Name

Questionable Research Labs

Team Members

Project Description

Problem Statement

We have all heard about NZ power being not entirely clean and green - at peak power times Coal and Oil is used. The problem for the community is that we don’t have easy ways of being aware of when this dirty generation is being used. That means it is hard to engage people with modifying their power use behaviour.
From talking to people (families and friends) it is very clear they would definitely restrain their power use at those times if they knew the power they were using came from coal and oil.

Solution

By tapping into available data sources, pulling it together into a web dashboard https://dirtywatts.nz and providing a public API, we can provide a way people can use generic smart lights and devices to make it obvious when polluting power is being used.
Secondly we can create a set of tutorials for individuals, schools and students, to engage with the data and build their own DirtyWatts indicator.
This project has the dual purpose of increasing our awareness of the issues while also giving us the agency to collectively help with reducing peak loads and its polluting impact. Secondly, it provides a pathway to learn about using digital technology in a pro-social practical manner for collective benefit.

See the website for details including the public API to tap into the new resource.

Data Story

The Dashboard pulls together data from 3 sources, the Electricity Authority , Transpower NZ, Wikipedia who had a listing of power stations in NZ and the locations. We look at this data through the exposed API every 15 min, and store this in a SQL database. This is then exposed as public API’s from our database for real time consumption by the frontend website and a Node App’s running on raspberry pi's using zigbee protocols to control lamps and sockets.