Climathon Lund 2017
Solar Energy
Climathon is an annual hackathon for climate solutions. The format was launched by Climate-KIC 2015 and has spread rapidly across the globe. In 2017, 104 cities participated in 6 continents, all at the same time 27 October, 10:00 to 10:00 the following day.
Lund University organized Climathon in Lund for the fiorst time 2017 together with Lund Municipality and Kraftringen. Lund's challenge 2017 was that Lund should be the leader of solar electricity production in Sweden within 5 years.
Due to the great interest, the registration to participate in Climathon in Lund had to close prematurely. At that time 72 people had already registered. Only three of the 104 participating cities received more registered participants; London, Berlin and Turin. The participants in Lund were a mix of people, most of them were students at Lund University, but there were also many students from DTU, entrepreneurs, professionals in the field and enthusiasts. The registered participants were aged 14-77 years.
The main venue for Climathon was the Water Hall. In this room, participants spent the first 22 hours of Climathon developing their ideas. As a break and inspiration to their work, participants were also able to listen to short presentations from Sol Voltaics, Lu Innovation, Venture Lab, Kraftringen and the Swedish Energy Agency. There were also activities such as five-match at the Water Hall, Afro Dance, Disco and Yoga. A lot of effort was also put on pitch training where the participants were drilled in presentation techniques by Ideon Innovations Neil Greenspan.
For the final presentations, the arrangement changed venue to Ideon. The participants were given the opportunity to present their solutions to a jury consisting of Emma Berginger, Municipal Council Environmental Party, Deputy Chairman of the Municipal Board and Chairman of the Technical Board, Sylvia Michel, CEO, Kraftringen, Bertil Lundström, Technical Manager, Lunds Kommuns Fastighets AB (LKF) , Lars J Nilsson, Professor at Environmental and Energy Systems Studies, Lund University, Bodil Rosvall Jönsson, CEO, BRJ Management AB and for a long time a key figure in the Innovation System of Skåne. A total of 11 teams presented and the quality of both the innovations and the presentations was consistently very high. The jury was provided with golden tickets that they could use to invite the teams to follow-up meetings and these were used extensively. As a final winner, the SolarSafe team was chosen. The team developed a business solution to increase the installation of solar panels in residential buildings through leasing agreements and economies of scale.
The facilitator of Climathon in Lund was Finnur Sverrisson who, in addition to being a moderator who presented speakers, etc. also arranged the team formation session. Finnur also took an active part in the work of the various teams and helped them out if they got stuck.