treehuggers

The Pitch

1. Describe the problem you are trying to solve

Carbon dioxide emissions are the primary cause of climate change. There is worldwide recognition of the urgency to reduce carbon emissions to avoid the impacts of climate change. However, there is also endless discussion on who exactly is responsible for climate change and how this responsibility should be shared across countries, regions, governments, corporations and individuals.

Instead of dabbling into debates, we believe that we need to act now to reduce carbon emissions and we can start by being aware of how we contribute and changing our daily habits such as charging our laptops only when the grid is clean as we believe that small actions can have a great impact.

2. Describe what your project does exactly in layperson's terms

Our state-of-the-art solution, Treehuggers, that is powered by the Green Software Foundation's Carbon Aware API, empowers users with the knowledge of when the grid is clean or dirty through a publicly available service that provides notifications.

When a user subscribes to our service, it calculates the nearest power grid and determines if the current state of the grid is clean or dirty based on the user's location. When the grid is dirty, the user is encouraged to switch to battery mode, otherwise they can continue to charge their devices using power supply. Users will be notified on an hourly basis on the status of the grid while they continue working on their laptops.

3. Describe how it uses the API/SDK

Treehuggers makes use of the Carbon Aware APIs and we have utilised the following endpoints:

• /emissions/average-carbon-intensity (last 7 days)

• /emissions/bylocation

We use the user’s location to determine the emissions at a point in time and compare that against the average carbon intensity over the last 7 days. If the current carbons emissions are higher than the average, we classify the grid as dirty, otherwise it is clean.

Although we ideally want carbon emission levels to be as low as 100 gCO2/kWh, there are certain locations as of right now where such a metric is not applicable due to factors such as source of electricity generation, regulations regarding electricity generation, distribution of electricity within regions etc. As such, benchmarking a location’s carbon emissions with a fixed metric is irrational. Hence, the average carbon intensity has been used to create a fairer measure and trigger nudges.

4. Describe how impactful it might be in terms of CO2 reductions and user reach (an example of low reduction but high reach would be targeting website requests, where a solution could make a very small reduction in CO2 emissions per request, but with millions of requests the impact could be significant. And example of high reduction and low reach would be a chlorine factory, where you might only reach one plant, but that would be enough to cut as many emissions as a few million web requests above.

We believe our current solution has high reach and low reduction if behavioural changes by users are implemented. There are 5.07 billion internet users and 2 billion computers in the world including laptops and desktops. However, we need to keep in mind that laptops and computers of different brands have different levels of carbon emissions, some more than the others. Microsoft reported that a Surface device produces 10kg of CO2 per year*. If 50% of internet users (assuming they use a Surface) reduce their power usage by 20%, it would result in a reduction of 5 million tonnes of CO2.

*https://devblogs.microsoft.com/sustainable-software/examining-the-carbon-footprint-of-devices/

5. Describe how feasible it is for you to get to a production ready state with a bit of time or prize money; how feasible it would be for others to implement, and how likely it is that they would choose to use your tool if made available

Our solution is live and ready to be used! It can be used by anyone with the link starting now :) We need funding to scale and roll it out and grow our user base. The likelihood of adoption is high because:

• No cost to the end user

• Almost zero onboarding effort

• No active monitoring

• No privacy or security issues

• Self-driven behavioural changes

6. Describe what is your vision for how the solution you have started to build in this hackathon could make a difference to the world.

Our vision is for each and every internet user to adopt our system.

As next steps, we want to collect user analytics to analyse the impact of the subscription service and find out the number of users who respond to the call to action.

We would then proceed with the gamification of the service. Some enhancements include getting users to introduce their friends and family to the application and compare their analytics against one another. Through this service we can create a generation of more carbon aware people.

7. The URL to the prototype app and/or code (e.g. Github + e.g. example.com/Carb22solution)

Github: https://github.com/huy-twks/treehuggers
Website: https://treehuggers.vercel.app/