This is the submission for team Ecologic and we present to you an idea of a TreeHAUS community.
For this project we analyzed the accessibility of the housing market in Blacksburg and found alarming results. Nearly 70% of the current graduate student body is being housed insecurely, meaning spending more than 40% of their monthly stipend on housing and utility costs. Several students are even spending more than 100% of their stipend on housing. With the projected doubling of students by 2047, this will only worsen and exacerbate the current challenge of meeting peak-energy demands. We aim to bridge this gap by developing a secure energy-distribution platform for buildings and neighborhoods that share a solar panel array.
EOSIO smart contracts will be used to transparently and dynamically distribute energy using tokens. At each timestep, the residents are allocated tokens worth a fair portion of total energy production minus their unit’s consumption. Excess energy is sold to neighbors just below retail rate, instead of back to the grid at much lower cogeneration rates, thus constantly incentivizing efficiency and energy sharing. Tokens earned can be used towards monthly rent payment and accessing other community facilities. The residents benefit through transparently earning money for good consumption habits, the VT community benefits as improved resource efficiency leads to reduced costs and more robust, resilient, and renewably-powered infrastructure.
Front-end provides an interface to track energy behaviour and tokens. It is integrated with a device-agnostic web-application that provides users with hourly time-stamped information about their total tokens, energy consumption trend and energy-trading patterns, while providing them the option to pay rent using their token balance. Lastly, the administrator can also visualize the energy transactions at the community-wide level.