Carbon-neutral communities
The Problem
Greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change. Many species have difficulties adapting to these changes, resulting in mass extinction of animals and plants. | In Poland, where all power plants are fueled by coal, electricity and heating houses are key contributors to carbon dioxide emission. People are willing to take action, but don't know how and often feel lonely in their efforts. Some don’t believe they can make a meaningful change by themselves, are skeptical about new ideas and technologies. Others choose to invest money in solutions that are promoted elsewhere as environmentally-friendly but are not locally given current circumstances (like electric cars where all electricity comes from coal mines). Many would like to cut their utilities bills while at the same time reducing their emission. | Authorities (government) lack willingness to convert coal mines to green energy, hence necessity to develop grass-roots movements.
Our Proposal
An app/web platform as a tool to help users achieve carbon-neutrality in their households. It would help them to understand the main contributors to their emission, assist in reducing it, and encourage to balance what remains emitted with a community managed, public offsetting service. The community offsetting will be based on linear plantations of Energetic Willow (Salix viminalis) on public terrains on the roadsides. Once grown, they can be used as fuel to heat houses, instead of natural gas or coal-originating electricity. | The program will calculate user's emission based on gas and electricity intake. An expert/recommendation system will advise how to reduce their footprint. The system will track changes over time so that user can see effects of their efforts, progress towards carbon-neutrality. It will also show other app users on a map and their cumulative progress, to give a sense of community and effectiveness of common efforts. For community leaders, aggregated data from individual households can help achieve carbon-neutrality for whole communities, similarly as it does for households. | All together, it will promote clean-air as common good and carbon-neutrality as an individual's responsibility supported by the community.
We Assume that...
Local authorities allow for linear plantations of bushy willow along the roads. It is commonly believed in Poland that trees pose danger for cars and many trees on a roadsides have been cut recently.
Households have counters to measure their electricity and gas consumption. It is good enough to read usage from monthly bills, or even yearly totals for gas company which relies on projections.
There will emerge demand for Willow biomass crops grown as part of this program. Users with less ecological heating systems will chose to switch to biomass.
Over time, given enough data is collected we could compare and rank efficiency of proposed solutions, based on average performance of previous deployments.
We’ll be able to read resources intake from utilities providers API or upload it automatically from the counters. Otherwise, users will be committed enough to periodically update their usage manually.
Users will appreciate data-driven approach and transparency. Even though we build on experiences of Dworek Polski only, our system will be non-proprietary, free from biases and marketing information.
Over time, thanks to observable progress, users who were reluctant to make improvements in their houses, will start trust our measurements and will feel more confident to make longer-term investments.
People would like to reduce greenhouse gases emission or cut utilities bills.
Constraints to Overcome
* People lack knowledge about available options to reduce carbon emitted by their households. * People lack tools to compare considered options one with the other in their local context. * Local authorities lack knowledge, data and tools to quantify how much of the emission could be offset by planting trees and how best to support individual efforts to reduce emission. * It's hard for energy solutions to attract new users and even harder for new innovative solutions to compete on the market
Current Work
Current Needs
We are fairly well positioned in terms of skills and knowledge to do the prototype, we are learning all the times though. With the biggest constraints being time and brainpower, we welcome help with software development, especially with front-end tasks (either android app or web based). We also highly appreciate any thoughts about underlying data, software and UI design, choice of recommended improvements, carbon emission or absorption by trees or really anything related to the project. We may also need more help later on, after the prototype is ready.