A couple of weeks ago, we participated in the hackathon organised by Elia Group, whose main activity is managing (high-voltage) electrical grid infrastructure in Belgium and parts of Germany.

Elia's Hackathon challenge

The goal of the hackathon was twofold: 

• present a business case relevant to Elia Group and to their producers, customers, suppliers or traders in the electricity market, also known as BRPs or Balance Responsible Parties.
• develop an algorithm that controls the assets of a home or an office to minimise the electricity bill

Efficient use of electricity

First some context: There's a wholesale market for energy where one can get paid to consume energy. This can happen, for example, if there's more wind or sunshine than expected, or if a factory suddenly shuts down. In order to access this market, one needs to be registered as a Balance Responsible Party (BRP) with Elia Group.

We envisioned a BRP that links supermarket chains, car parks or other businesses with their electric vehicle-owning customers. The idea is to incentivise these customers to charge their cars at a time when the electricity price is negative. The profits from charging the cars would be shared between the BRP, the businesses and its customers.

Our BRP would also work with office buildings and allow fleet managers to earn money by charging company cars when the price is negative. 

Happy hour: charge at the right time

To achieve this, we developed an app named (fittingly) Happy Hour. Through Happy Hour, fleet managers gain an overview of their fleet's vehicles, including their charging status and whether they're currently charging during the designated 'Happy Hour.' The app takes into account user's input on when they plan to leave and how far they plan to drive.

Additionally, we show insights into each vehicle's earnings and offer some fun facts about the saved energy. 

We connected our app with the Real-Time Price APIs from Elia Group. This enabled us to calculate the Happy Hour, the optimal time for car charging. Using the same algorithm, we tackled the second part of the hackathon challenge and finished 3rd place in that category!

Overall, we learned a lot about the different intricacies of the electricity market and the challenges that Elia Group faces. We also had a great time – the amount of fun we had was inversely proportional to the amount of sleep we had during those 3 days of hackathon!