Developer! Developer! Developer! East Anglia

DDD East Anglia

Cambridge, UK
Saturday 22 September 2018

Saving the world with IoT

You don't have to be a super hero, to make a difference to our planet. Just a bit of programming skills will suffice. We can't imagine our lives without electricity. We use it to have light and heat, keep our food fresh, we work with computers, use mobile phones, and don't forget entertainment! We need electricity for driving cars, even more now with EVs. Electricity is generated mostly with fossil fuels, we can use nuclear power and hope that nobody makes a mistake and people do make mistakes. That's why we build wind farms, solar panels, hydro power plants, but we can't force them to generate electricity when we want. They are not aware of world cup finals. So how can we make sure, we use green power more? We need to store electricity when they can generate it, and use when they produce less, but storing electricity is hard. We have to change the way we consume energy, but it has to be automatic, so people wouldn't even know. That's what we do at OVO Energy, using IoT devices to change the power usage patterns, create virtual power plant, which can be used when the demand exceeds supply. I will show you how we use Azure IoT Hub to do that, you don't have to be C or C++ developer to work with IoT.