Real-time AI energy simulator for Austin's power grid.
Austin's grid can't see a 100,000-person football game coming. GridPulse fixes that — it fuses live event data, crowd intelligence from camera feeds, weather conditions, and urban planning projections into hyperlocal energy forecasts and battery dispatch commands.
Built for the TVG Hacks hackathon targeting Base Power's distributed battery fleet.
GridPulse runs on a four-layer architecture:
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Event Intelligence — Ingests UT Austin athletics, Moody Center, Ticketmaster, and other event calendars. Each event gets a crowd estimate, geographic footprint, and dispersal timeline.
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VLM Crowd Confirmation — Gemini Vision analyzes live Austin traffic camera feeds to estimate real-time parking lot fill rates, dynamically adjusting crowd forecasts with confidence scores.
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Simulation Canvas — An interactive map of Austin with three modes:
- Real-Time — Active events as pulsing nodes, crowd density heat maps, live ERCOT price ticker, demand wave propagation by zip code.
- Weather Stress Test — Slide temperature from 50°F to 110°F and watch projected post-event AC load shift neighborhood by neighborhood.
- Urban Planning — Project Connect light rail stations, capital improvement projects, and zoning corridors overlaid on the map. Click any project to simulate 5- and 10-year energy demand impact.
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Dispatch Engine — Outputs zip-code-level battery pre-charge commands with plain-English reasoning traces and revenue estimates.
| Layer | Tech |
|---|---|
| Frontend | React, TypeScript, Vite, Mapbox GL, Tailwind CSS |
| Backend | Python, FastAPI |
| VLM | Google Gemini (multimodal) |
| Data | ERCOT historical load, OpenWeatherMap, TXDOT camera feeds, Austin open data |
cd backend
cp .env.example .env # fill in your API keys
pip install -e .
uvicorn app.main:app --reloadcd frontend
cp .env.example .env
npm install
npm run devThe frontend runs on http://localhost:5173 and the backend API on http://localhost:8000.
- Damodar Kamani
- Rehan Mollick
- Kaustubh Kondapalli
- Mehak Arora