27 September 2018
Alpha-I and Power2U are the winners of Hack The Wind 2018
Alpha-I and Power2U hacked their way to a €5000 prize each on the second edition on the hugely successful wind energy hackathon, held under a deal between industry advocacy body WindEurope and European sustainable energy innovation outfit InnoEnergy. The prizes were awarded during the WindEurope Conference at the Global Wind Summit2018, held from 25 till 28 September at the Hamburg Messe.
The decision was announced by a jury made up of experts in the wind sector, in the afternoon of the third day of the event.
Emilien Simonot, Renewable Energy Technology Officer at InnoEnergy, said, “After a successful first edition last year, this year has been marked by a confirmation of the relevance of the format thanks to the high degree of preparation of the participating teams, resulting in imaginative and impactful solutions to the proposed challenges.”
Malgosia Bartosik, Deputy CEO of WindEurope, said: “Hack The Wind is consolidating as one of the must-be events in the agenda of anyone working with digital innovation in the
wind business.”
Moreover, Chlorophyll and ODS.AI won the prize worth €2000 for delivering the best technical achievement on each challenge. On top of this, InnoEnergy has awarded an In-Kind prize – namely, business coaching service – to both alpha-I and Ginkgo for their potential to keep on developing their ideas into an actual business in the future. The teams were proposed two challenges on this edition; Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy had the participants working on Blockchain applications for hybrid systems optimisation, while EDP Renewables proposed a challenge related to predictive maintenance and O&M optimisation.
Antonio de la Torre, CTO of Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, said “We believe in the benefit that can be obtained from open innovation environments, as way to generate new ideas on the challenges of our industry. Hack The Wind gave us deep insights on what cross-functional teams are to achieve, combining blockchain knowledge, data analytics capabilities, understanding of the energy domain, and not least, front-end development skills.”
António Vidigal, CEO of EDP Innovation said, “EDP is very pleased to have sponsored ‘Hack The Wind’ one year more. The organization was perfect and we had the opportunity to interact with many talented people. We believe that our industry is moving from capital intensive to knowledge intensive, and EDP is betting on an Open Innovation Model – which allows EDP to leverage on external talent. It was also the right place and time to launch our EDP Open Data initiative, which puts digital and domain knowledge together. We look forward to partnering in new hackathons.”
Hack The Wind 2018 hackathon has seen students, data scientists, data analysts, coders, back/front end developers, Blockchain experts, start-ups, industry actors, among others, working in teams during 48 hours to contribute to the development of 13 solutions to solve one of the challenges.
