UCL Energy student wins Transparency Prize

Students from the UCL Energy Institute excelled at the London Green Hackathon held on 28th-29th January at UCL with two PhD students winning prizes.

Will Usher was part of a team of four that won the Transparency Prize for their project ‘Company Carbon Death Map’.

Will (first left in photograph) said: ‘We had 24 hours to conceive, design and deliver a hack.  We chose to give a very simple but compelling indication of the amount of change needed by the largest corporations around the world, packaged in a tactile and fun app.'

The app shows a map of the world with the logos of FTSE100 companies located around their HQ countries.  A slider along the bottom allows users to see at which point companies ‘go extinct’ i.e. at what carbon price the cost of a companies’ annual CO2 emissions outweighs their annual earnings.

The judges said: ‘Company Carbon Deathmap hits two audiences: it’s provocative and could be used to apply pressure to industries, equally it helps bring visibility of risk to mainstream investors.’

The team are planning to revisit the app, and put it on a website for everyone to play around with soon.

Tia Kansara also had great success with winning the Built Environment Prize.