Join CSIRO's first ever Solar Hackathon! Register here.

How does $10,000* in cash prizes sound? What about the chance to work with the brightest minds in Australia by creating your own solar start-up in less than 24 hours?

Join CSIRO for our first ever Solar Hackathon on Friday 8 April and Saturday 9 April 2016 at the CSIRO Energy Centre Newcastle, home to solar innovation and research. Register here.

If you are a savvy developer, creative designer, researcher or simply keen on solar, we want to hear your ideas! You could win up to $10,000 in cash prizes so come along and help solve the world's solar challenges.

CSIRO, Australia’s national scientific research agency has partnered with Powerhouse (formerly SfunCube), a Silicon Valley based incubator dedicated to solar and the brains behind two highly successful Solar Hackathons to bring the Hackathon fever to Newcastle, Australia.

Why you should come

At CSIRO’s Solar Hackathon you will:

Two successful Powerhouse solar startups - Powerhive and UtilityAPI - emerged from previous Solar Hackathons so we can't wait to see what solar software, finance, and design solutions are created this year at CSIRO.

The fun kicks off on Friday 8 April from 7.30pm-10pm with a welcome event followed by hacking, presentations and awards on Saturday 9 April from 8am-10pm.

Challenges

1. The way people use energy is influenced by air-conditioning, solar systems, electric vehicles and batteries. To avoid electricity system upgrades and overloading, identify a low cost solution to accurately predict energy use and to manage demand – taking in to consideration energy, weather and demographics. Create a consumer engagement strategy for your solution.

2. Create solar power estimations and identify cost savings for a potential PV buyer considering the roof area, orientation and generation profiles. Determine the likely load profile of a particular house using publicly available data.

3. Identify a low-cost cleaning solution for large numbers of tightly packed solar PV systems or heliostats (computer-controlled mirrors that keeps the sun reflected on panels).

4. Concentrated solar thermal (CST) can be effected by external weather factors such as wind. Create an application or tool that can be attached to the heliostat mirrors to measure and track movement, increase performance assessment and improve energy yield. Options could include optical cameras or photodiodes.

5. Create a creative marketing campaign to increase public awareness of the benefits of solar energy. This can include PV, CST and flexible PV.

6. Solar panels can underperform or produce less energy under high temperatures. Explore methods to cool solar panels for better energy output.

Datasets / API's

MERRA: MODERN-ERA RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS FOR RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS

http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/research/merra/

Nasa Surface meteorology and Solar Energy (there are other versions of this dataset that can be more accurate if you are interested  I can get in contact with the person I know that is using this)

https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/sse/sse.cgi?skip@larc.nasa.gov+s01#s01

AURIN: Australia’s urban intelligence network, this is a centralised source of geo-datasets (www.aurin.org.au ).

BoM one Minute Solar Data:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/oneminsolar/about-IDCJAC0022.shtml

Air-conditioner location running hours data:

https://data.gov.au/dataset/air-conditioner-location-running-hours-data/resource/093918f4-cbc6-4298-925f-221a592e29fa

Datasets from 2015 GovHack:

https://www.govhack.org/2015-data/

Read the Frequently Asked Questions

*Solar Hackathon prize money has been generously donated by our sponsors.