GridSense

Real-time grid carbon dashboard and demand spike simulator.
Built at HooHacks 2026.

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What it does

• Live carbon intensity — Shows the current Marginal Operating Emissions Rate (MOER) for any U.S. city, normalized into a 0–100 Clean Power Score
• 24-hour forecast — Hourly MOER forecast chart with automatic best 2-hour window detection
• Appliance nudges — Tells you when to run your dishwasher, EV charger, washer, and dryer to minimize carbon emissions, with per-cycle CO₂ savings
• Grid stress simulator — Side-by-side heat wave / cold snap / normal day timelines showing how load-shifting prevents grid failure
• Push alerts — Subscribe to ntfy.sh notifications when Grid Load Pressure crosses 70%

Screenshots

Demo

Tech stack

Layer	Tools
Backend	FastAPI, Uvicorn, Pydantic, httpx
Data	WattTime v3 (carbon), Open-Meteo (weather), Google Maps (geocoding)
AI	Azure OpenAI — nudge text generation only
Frontend	React 18, React Router, Vite, Tailwind CSS
Alerts	ntfy.sh

Quick start

1. Configure environment

cp .env.example .env

The default mode is USE_MOCK_DATA=true, which runs the full dashboard and simulator with no API keys.

For live data, set these in .env:

Variable	Purpose
USE_MOCK_DATA	Set false to enable live data sources
WATTTIME_USER	WattTime account username
WATTTIME_PASSWORD	WattTime account password
AZURE_OPENAI_BASE_URL	Azure OpenAI endpoint (e.g. https://your-resource.services.ai.azure.com/openai/v1/)
AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY	Azure OpenAI key
AZURE_OPENAI_DEPLOYMENT	Deployment name (e.g. gpt-5.4-mini)
GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY	For city geocoding

2. Start the backend

cd backend
pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn main:app --reload --port 8000

3. Start the frontend

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

• Frontend: http://localhost:5173
• Backend: http://localhost:8000

API reference

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/api/health	Health check
GET	/api/intensity?city=Charlottesville	Current MOER, Clean Power Score, weather
GET	/api/forecast?city=Charlottesville	24-hour hourly forecast
GET	/api/weather?city=Charlottesville	Temperature, conditions, heat-wave flag
POST	/api/nudges	Appliance timing recommendations with CO₂ savings
POST	/api/simulate	Grid stress simulation with load-shifting

Further reading

See overview.md for a detailed explanation of every metric — MOER, Clean Power Score, Grid Load Pressure, the simulation model, and what's observed vs. derived vs. AI-generated.