KIMATICA (opens in a new tab) / POCITYF (opens in a new tab) · Energy
Trading energy between neighbors.
A peer-to-peer energy-trading app for EU energy communities: residents track their energy, sell their surplus to neighbors and earn rewards. Demonstrated live at the Évora pilot.
The context
POCITYF, an EU Horizon 2020 smart-city project, wanted residents of its energy communities to trade the energy their homes produce. Évora, Portugal, was the pilot, with Alkmaar in the Netherlands to follow. The local energy provider had fitted each enrolled home with monitoring hardware and exposed its readings through APIs. Trades were financial rather than physical: each one was settled on monthly bills, crediting the seller and charging the buyer, within margins the provider set.
My contribution
I led technical delivery in a team of three, with a junior developer and a project manager. I turned requirements into specifications and features, made the main architecture, implementation and UI/UX decisions, and reviewed the junior developer’s pull requests. I also ran releases and demos for the project partners.
Key decisions
Check live readings before every trade
The app polled the provider’s APIs every few minutes for production and consumption, then fetched fresh readings right before any transaction, so trades used current data rather than the last poll. The APIs arrived later than agreed; regular technical meetings with the partners kept the integration on track.
Grow adoption with rewards, not ads
To attract residents, the project manager proposed paid promotion. I proposed gamification and an invite-a-friend scheme where residents earn points instead. The partners adopted it, and the municipality made the points redeemable for public transport, museum tickets and offers from partner businesses.
Redesign the interface early
The first interface had been built by a developer without design support. Early on, I made the case for a professional redesign; the CEO approved it, and I led the UI/UX decisions that followed.
The outcome
Trading between users worked end to end in testing, and I demonstrated the application live at the municipal pilot in Évora. Some gamification features were still incomplete when I left in November 2023; they didn’t block trading. With hindsight, I’d have invested earlier in unit and integration tests, and taken a more active part in partner meetings.