Plugreen Energy

Welcome to the Future of Energy Optimization!

1. The Problem

Right now, there are around 15 billion mobile devices operating worldwide, and each year, approximately 400 million new laptops and tablets and 2 billion cell phones are shipped worldwide, this means, that if every person on the planet, from babies to very old people had a battery-operated device, each one of us would have more than 2 devices in use every day, and let’s face it, you probably have 3 to 5. 

On top of this, laptops usually stay "charging" day and night, and cell phones charge during the whole night and sometimes even during the day too, and have you noticed that once your device is fully charged, it starts wasting energy in heat? This is a HUGE energy problem! And if we give people the option of choosing the best time to charge their devices, they won’t make the best decisions most of the time, even if we tell them when to do it.

There are dozens of “Smart Devices” options in the market that help you to manage the energy you use at home. Some of them allow you to control your electronics with your voice or through their app, but ALL of them expect that YOU make all the decisions... 

And even if they were carbon-aware solutions, their notifications will probably show up on your cellphone or laptop when… you can’t do anything about it.

2. The Solution 

At Plugreen Energy, we propose to create really smart devices that not only tell you when is the right time to charge your battery-operated devices, but they actually do it for you when the energy is clean and stop doing it when the energy is dirty.

As these gadgets belong to the "Smart" category, you’ll be able to set up schedules, and use your voice to manage your electronics but, if you really want to have optimal energy consumption for a device, you can leave it to the Plugreen Energy App.

We’ll create the following products that will make your life easier while automatically reducing your carbon footprint every day.

Smart and Carbon-Aware Outlets

Install these outlets at the office and reduce the carbon emissions of the whole company! And if your employees work from home, then you could gift one outlet to each person, so they install it at their working place and lower their carbon impact too! If just some Tech companies adopted these outlets, the impact on carbon emissions would be huge!

Install them at home and watch your impact and your electricity bill go down.

Use this outlet to connect your laptop, tablet, or cellphone, and we’ll optimize the charging level of your device with the help of the Plugreen Energy App.

Don’t fret! We won’t let your devices run dry! If energy is dirty, we’ll limit the charge to 40% of the max battery level so you have enough power to keep going with your life for a while and when the energy is clean again, you’ll be able to charge your battery to over 95%.

- “Why not a 100?”

Because after you reach 100%, most of the devices just keep “charging” and the extra energy that they pull from the grid goes wasted in heat as we mentioned before.

Smart and Carbon-Aware Mini Plugs

This is the perfect option for professionals on the go! If you work from different places every day but still want to optimize energy consumption and lower the overall impact of your devices, you can use this plug to charge them according to the cleaning status of the energy at the time and place that you’re working from.

Also a great alternative for those who can’t install permanent solutions at home or work.

Smart and Carbon-Aware Light Dimmer

Have you ever been focused on a task and realized that it’s very dark and you didn’t notice when the sun went down? Human eyes can only perceive changes in light when there is a big and sudden change in brightness. If you gradually and slowly adjust the light of a room, your eyes adjust and you don’t even notice the changes. Let’s use this amazing human capability to save power when the energy is dirty!

Our light dimmers will automatically decrease the brightness of your bulbs when the energy gets dirtier and increase it when the energy is clean. You can adjust the maximum and minimum thresholds that are comfortable for you and our app will do the rest, without you even noticing it.

Plugreen Energy App

Use this app to manage your Plugreen Energy products and your electronic devices:

1. Pair your Plugreen Energy devices with your account.

2. Plug in and sync your battery-operated devices and we’ll optimize their charging times and battery levels according to the cleanliness of the energy and your use habits.

3. Set up and add schedules to your connected devices.

4. Use voice controls to operate your electronics with our integration with Alexa and Google Home Assistant.

5. Visualize the performance of carbon-aware driven automations and the impact on the reduction of carbon emissions that you and your devices achieve by switching to Plugreen Energy products.

What About Other Electronic Devices? Those Without A Battery?

Don’t worry, I’m already on it! Let’s get these 3 products to market and then we’ll talk about the next amazing products I have in mind!

3. How We Used The Green Software Foundation SDK and API

The Plugreen Energy app and website will use our carbon-aware API that is based on the Carbon Aware SDK/API from the Green Software Foundation. 

It allows the configuration of dynamic strategies based on:

• Device type.
• Battery level (for battery-operated devices).
• Brightness intensity (for light dimmers).
• The carbon index at the geographic location of the device.
• Parameters predefined by the users to personalize their devices. 

 This means that the system:

• Monitors and decides if now is the best time to charge your devices depending on how clean is the energy in your zone (every 5 minutes at the moment).
• Defines for how long you will be able to charge your devices based on the battery level and the cleanliness of the energy in your zone (we won't leave your devices run dry, we'll give them enough energy to work for a certain time, but not too much that they just waste it).
• Automatically and gradually reduces the intensity of the lights in a room (or the whole company building) during the time that the energy is dirty, enough to lower the energy use, while at the same time, being imperceptible by the people that are in the room.

4. Impact Of Our Solution

We could calculate the emissions of all the devices in the United States but, we all know that not everybody is interested in lowering their carbon impact so, let's run a couple of more realistic scenarios that can have a bigger impact because they would "force" people to use more clean energy on a regular basis.

But first, I want to explain why I said "force" in the previous paragraph. When you decide to install smart solutions at the workplace or at home and, to be able to get power from the outlet to charge your devices you need to have an app that optimizes the energy consumption of your device, you are kind of being forced to go green. 

Those that use the outlets won't have to do any extra work or be thinking when to plug or unplug from the outlet because our app will do that for them, therefore, the importance of the decision of going green or not, doesn't go to thousands or millions of people, it goes to the person that decides if their whole company or their home is going green or not. These are the people we want to reach out to.

For instance, this is the number of employees per sponsor Company of the Carbonhack Event in 2021/2022:

• Accenture - 721,000
• Thoughtworks - 10,000
• Goldman Sacks - 43,900
• Avanade - 56,000
• Gamma - 1,700
• UBS - 71,000
• Intel - 121,100
• Globant - 31,000
• VMWare - 37,500
• Total Sponsor's Employees: 1,092,200

Let's assume that these companies decide to install our Carbon-Aware Outlets at their offices and give one Mini Plug to each one of their employees. 

Let's also assume that each employee has only one cellphone and only 50% of them have laptops, this is 1,092,200 cellphones plus 546,100 laptops, or 1,638,300 devices in total.

When you use your cellphone for around 10 hours every day, it emits approximately 86 kg of CO2 per year, and a laptop that's used for around 8 hours every day emits between 44 and 88 kg of CO2 per year (let's use the average for our calculations, this is 66 kg/year).

Calculating the total emissions of the devices mentioned above, we get a total of 129,971,800 kg of CO2 per year, this is approximately 143,269 tons of CO2 per year. By optimizing the way these devices consume power, we can reduce the amount of energy that's wasted in heat and running processes that are triggered when the battery is full but the device is not in use. 

Let's say we can reduce the emissions by 10%, this would mean that only by using 1 Outlet or Mini Plug per person at the office of the sponsors, we could reduce almost 14,327 tons of CO2 per year! 

Let's go lower and say we can just reduce 1% of the total emissions, this still is 1,433 tons of CO2 per year for just the 8 sponsor companies of the hackathon!!! 

And we are not counting the impact if some of the family members of the employees also adopt the Carbon-Aware plugs (and the colors of the Mini Plugs will get the interest of a lot of them for sure, even the kids!).

Now, according to Grand View Research, the smart home market was valued at USD 62.69 billion in 2021 with a special focus on energy-efficient devices and energy management, which gives us a great opportunity to reach many more people and take the reduction of carbon emissions to a bigger scale with the help of companies like the Green Software Foundation and services like the ones provided by WattTime. 

We can also take advantage of the reach that companies like Amazon, or PR and Marketing Campaigns can give us, to get to the very specific target market that we'll be selling to.

Think about it, these products can be used by almost everyone on the planet, we just need to take them to market.

5. Feasibility

A little background history about us:

Gina

• I've been selling products on Amazon for the last 6 years. I know how to source products (I already have the contact information of a couple of smart device suppliers) and know how to import and distribute the products. I know Amazon's platform in and out and I know how to launch and position a product there. Amazon has 310 million users worldwide and even if only a small percentage of them buy our products, the impact that we can have on carbon reduction is huge! During these years I've been selling simpler products because the more complex, the higher the costs of the products, and I've been funding my business with part of the income that I make by working as a Product Manager for a tech company (one of the sponsors of the hackathon actually) and this has limited the options I've had.
• I'm also a Shopify Partner and, as you can see here (use the password "greensoftware" to access the store), I can create a Brand with a full website in under 2 weeks (that's part of what I did for this hackathon). The store is ready and I would only need to get real photos of the products after production and it will be ready to receive orders (I could receive pre-orders now by the way... are you interested?).
• This hackathon gave me the opportunity to think big and to design several products that can literally change the world! It gave me the differentiator for the products from the regular "Smart" devices (ours are Carbon-Aware too!). It made me think about how I would invest the money of the price, and when you have $45K as an initial investment, the conditions of what you can do change a lot.
• I AM READY! I understand now that everything I've done before in my life was getting ready for this opportunity and I really want to win the hackathon and that YOU buy our products!

Camilo

• I have 12+ years of experience developing software for 500 Fortune Companies, and wearing the required hats as a Developer, Architect, or Technical Manager according to the project's needs.
• I'm passionate about good coding practices and really performant application development.
• I will always engineer a good solution before starting to code.
• During the hackathon, I developed the API that will be the heart of the project and that was described in point 3.

Fun fact about us: We've been together for 23 years, almost 18 of them happily married, we have 2 kids, and we make a great team when we work together!

So, in terms of the feasibility of this project, it started with this hackathon and it's in progress NOW!

In the next weeks we'll invest the money from the prize in launching the MVP by working on the following verticals:

•  Production of the Smart and Carbon-Aware Outlet: 
  • Design of the electronic components, smart features, and carbon-aware features required for the use of the app (I already contacted several electronic engineers and I'll choose one to work with them on this project).
  • Getting prototypes done for testing.
  • Start mass production (1,000 to 3,000 units depending on further research and negotiation with the suppliers).
  • Obtaining the security certifications required for these types of electronic devices.
  • Importing the products (part by air and the rest by sea to lower costs).
  • Launch them on Amazon and on our own Shopify Store. We can accept B2B and DTC orders.  
• Development of the Plugreen Energy App: 
  • Hire a development team to build the different app versions required. We will develop native apps to be able to easily access the internal features of the devices (battery, charge, etc.).
  • Develop the Desktop version for Windows and Mac.
  • Develop the native version for Android devices.
  • The native iOS version will be developed after the MVP in a later phase.
• Completion of the API services that manage and optimize the devices' energy use. These services are being developed in Java / Kotlin and will be deployed on a cloud service to be defined. We will analyze the costs and features of the cloud service options available, along with their carbon impact to make the final decision on which to use.
• Integration of all the parts of the system with the devices.
• Marketing:
  • Hire a team to manage the brand on Amazon (I already have an agency that can do this for us because I've worked with them in the past).
  • Hire a team to manage Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads (or I can run the ads myself if necessary).
  • Get ready for a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign to raise more money to fund the production of the other products. 

6. Our Vision

During the last 2 weeks, we've dreamt of these outlets, mini plugs, and light dimmers being used everywhere in the world! 

We've imagined them in airports in Japan, in homes and offices in Europe, inside buildings of huge US Companies, and in very cool Smart Homes, libraries, and coffee shops across the US and Canada.

If only 1% of the people that has a laptop or a cellphone would use one of our products, and we were able to reduce the carbon emissions by just 1%, then we would be reducing approximately 156,749 tons of CO2 per year!

7. Important Links

Plugreen Energy Store: https://plugreenenergy.com/  Use the password "greensoftware" to access the store.

Carbon-Aware API Repository: https://github.com/plugreenEnergy/PlugreenEnergy 

Video Pitch: https://youtu.be/LqfGOdsBWkY