The list feels like "this is everything you can try" rather than "this is everything you should try".
Some of these are "let's take an unrelated industry and try to cram climate into its story", others are ideas that are doomed to fail. And the "if only forests existed forever they would be a better carbon sink" argument is so flawed I am disappointed to see it at all.
But, also a lot of good projects to work on in there.
I'd rather not give a thorough list, for obvious reasons. I will note one example, they note "Long-haul aviation does not currently have a generally accepted path to electrification", but include it on the list anyway.
YC's business model is to invest in "everything you can try." I don't think this intended to be a list of opportunities that YC believes are 100% likely to succeed; it's intended to be a list that probably includes one or more ideas that will succeed.
Lately i've been thinking that right now may be a great time to start an oil company. Cost of solar is going down so capturing c02 and turning it into fuel is looking like a viable option. People would pay a premiun for carbon neutral fuel. Most climate companies, focused on carbon capture, tried to make the most efficient carbon capture possible, but what if one focused on scalability and reducing manufacturing costs instead? A device that loses 90%+ of the energy when converting sun to fuel, would be viable if the cost of the machine would just be low enough, and scaled up enough. Such a device would in theory have a near 0 cost of operation once installed, so with a long enough life span it would be profitable.
https://www.twelve.co is doing this (with fuels as well as other carbon-derived chemicals). Trouble is, this is carbon recycling, not carbon sequestering. It's better than the status quo, but I'm more excited about ideas that either sequester GHGs permanently or replace industrial GHG-generating processes permanently.
The first step is to reduce emissions, then stop them all together and finally sequester them to return to pre-climate-change level. I'd welcome all solutions along that spectrum.
There's no fundamental difference between burning a synthetic fuel or burning a fossel fuel and sequestering the resulting carbon. Both are zero-carbon.
Yes, sequestration can go negative-carbon, but that doesn't help anybody who has a difficult to replace fuel burning process.
Storing liquids (or solids) from at STP is far simpler than storing it in gaseous form. If we can cheaply extract CO2 or methane from the atmosphere and make liquid from it, we could sequester it in all sorts of trivial ways.
Sure, but that's not what Twelve is doing or what the "I should start an oil company" comment suggested. They're talking about extracting CO2 to make fuel, and then burning it again in the same petroleum-based economy.
Yeah sure. And that ties into all our existing infrastructure, which seems fair.
If we can extract and burn and extract and burn and keep going with that loop (without dinosaur input), then all that extract-burn cycle is zero-carbon.
We can then separately decide to pump some of that cycle’s output into easy liquid storage, thus going carbon-negative.
I think you're on to something, it makes me curious what the energy expenditure of one of these operations is in a conventional deployment, then what it would be over time with solar being the producer of energy.
Thanks for the link! $15 is a reasonable price where a company hyper focused on lowering the cost of manufacturing of C02 extraction machines, could become very competative withing a reasonable timeframe.
This is the play that Terraform Industries is engaging in as well. Cost for synthesizing a unit of methane from atmospheric CO2 and water using solar power is set to drop lower than the cost of drilling it out of the ground.
According to their December newsletter, they project that point will occur in 2027 without subsidies and 2024 with the subsidies provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
> lower than the cost of drilling it out of the ground.
Shipping is a huge component of the price of natural gas. So it'll be a long time before they're cheaper than the price of natural gas in Alberta or Siberia, but they'll be able to beat the price in Los Angeles a lot sooner.
The only thing that would move the needle on a massive societal level is reliable nuclear energy in every city and country. But is that too hard for startups to tackle? Or it doesn’t fit the narrative? Every other climate “tech” just nibbles at the margins if that even. And the byproduct of mass nuclear energy adoption would be that the issue is solved and there would be no more climate mongering amongst the conference crowd. They would have to find another “the sky is falling down” cause. That would also lead to less justifications for war from the war crowd if all the world had true energy security. Maybe that’s why?
Why do people keep spouting this nonsense? Yes there is a place for nuclear in the mix, but renewables have already moved the dial in a lot if countries. I the uk about 40% of our energy is from renewables, mostly wind at 25% and biomass for much of the rest. Or does that not fit your narrative? Or do you not consider that moving the needle? It's a damn sight easier, quicker and cheaper to put up wind turbines and solar panels than it is to build new nuclear reactors as well
The core issue is that they are unreliable when there is no wind or sunlight. Storage at scale is still not affordable or available for the whole world. The recent electricity issues that western Europe faced are indicative of the failings of unSustainable energy.
"We said we were running on renewables, but we were also dependent on burning Russian gas, and we plan to keep burning gas for the foreseeable future, sans the buying-gas-from-Russia part" sounds like a pretty important detail to talk about sustainable energy, IMHO.
"Renewables need to be supplemented" is a very different claim from "the only thing that would move the needle ... is reliable nuclear energy" (emphasis added).
Nuclear energy can't solve the problem on its own either, because you still need plants to deal with rapid changes in demand. We shouldn't be working towards a silver bullet, we should be using a lot of different technologies together to solve the problem.
You just need nuclear and existing hydropower, which boils down to you just need nuclear. It's not politically probable or realistic though, but we really just need nuclear technically speaking.
Nuclear can also follow loads, but there's no economical need to build them to do that (in almost any market).
The problem is that a lot of the claims of "Renewables providing X percent of energy in country Y" are massaging the numbers. See the countless examples from Germany over the last decade (I'm including one of the most shared examples of this at the bottom of my post), suddenly shown to be highly deceptive by what has happened over the last year with Russian gas imports to Germany.
Nuclear reactors are expensive because we don’t build any of them.
Solar and wind occupy way more land for the same power production and can’t produce baseload power without battery storage systems that cost 5x as much.
Nuclear reactors are expensive mostly because the regulatory requirements make them expensive. There is a lot of room for advanced nuclear (e.g. gen III reactors) that can address a lot of the problems and bring down the costs. Unfortunately, we don't have a clear regulatory pathway here yet, but there is some progress being made recently.
Sharing this not to say it’s true, but it’s my understanding of the EU’s biomass numbers.
As I understand it, a substantial portion of the biomass is wood pellets. These are harvested from the American south causing deforestation, are transported over the ocean with non-negligible emissions, and then burned in non-clean stacks releasing carbon, but they are accounted for as green. So you get a dirty burn, dirty transportation, and deforest a region as part of these numbers.
Its hard for me to accept that this narrative is correct, but I've struggled to find anything that explains how EU's biomass is net good for the environment. Do you have any insight?
> They would have to find another “the sky is falling down” cause.
You've nailed it. The people in power don't want to fix these problems. They'd like them to get worse, actually. "Never let a crisis go to waste" has the corollary "if a crisis doesn't exist, create one."
The missing thing: international incentive structures.
Today, most things are done the most economical way. And that might involve emitting carbon.
A country which regulates the emissions of carbon will end up producing goods and services using carbon free methods - but those methods will often be less economically efficient than the carbon producing method, even at scale.
So any country that goes all in on the carbon-free world will end up economically worse off -- it's goods won't be competitive in the global marketplace. A government cannot subsidize itself to competitiveness in all markets.
Solve that problem, and the world will decarbonize itself almost overnight.
It appears that all solutions to this problem require one of:
* All countries to agree on an incentive scheme (unlikely - although big trading blocs like EU/China/Russia/USA might be able to bully the rest of the world into it with the threat of sanctions if they do not agree)
* Some countries to agree on a scheme, and to break WTO rules to penalize (carbon tax) imports and subsidize exports to/from those who do not.
Or... the world continues on the current trajectory of decarbonizing highly visible things only (Electric cars, solar panels on the roof!) to appease voters while avoiding decarbonizing anything that much affects nationwide competitiveness (eg. steel/fertilizer production).
YC can’t solve that. I agree it’s an important cause, but it’s really hard coordination problem. If we can make progress without, just by using tech to lower emissions, that’s a clear win.
Having said that, a CO2 tax just makes the financial incentives for change better; someone still needs to build the better system after funds are reallocated. So if you already started a cost-reduction startup, you’ll have first-mover advantage when the CO2 taxes come into play.
> So any country that goes all in on the carbon-free world will end up economically worse off -- it's goods won't be competitive in the global marketplace. A government cannot subsidize itself to competitiveness in all markets.
Isn't this just the tragedy of the commons writ large?
It makes no sense for anyone really to make personal sacrifices for the planet. Why should I stay at home riding my pushbike to the artisan markets when my neighbour will gleefully fly to Hawaii for his holidays, undoing in a few days whatever carbon reductions I've achieved in a year?
The logical course is to accept that your actions mean nothing and live a greedy life, amassing wealth at the cost of the planet's health and hoarding it for when things get bad, whether that's this generation or the next.
> Tesla for home appliances: re-inventing home appliances (water heaters, induction stoves, clothes dryers, etc) to create better consumer experiences using specific advantages of electric technology.
> Tesla-like experience for home energy management: smart hub, including smart charging, load shifting, software-based load shedding for improved resiliency, and better circuit-level energy use measurement.
With how Tesla vehicles are rated, and the unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners, no way in hell am I do I want to "Teslify" everything in my home. In order to prove that there's something wrong with the current consumer experience, you have to bring an example to show it. So far, I've only seen ways to further add more surveillance and advertising into everyday people's lives, not to mention the increased disposability of appliances. No thanks.
Considering what a terrible year this has been for Tesla stock and their absentee CEO it would be more fitting in 2021.
The brand has enough baggage by now that the second-highest comment chain is about its unsuitability as an ideal, rather than discussing the content itself.
The way I see it when talking about Tesla it’s talking about the pre/post Tesla (aka the transition from ICE to EV in all auto makers) and not the build quality of Tesla per se !
^ This. There is just a backlash on HN with Elon hurting so many people's feels about Twitter & having an alternate political view, that everyone is seeing him in a negative light.
Tesla helped push ICE to EV even though technologically some of the efforts may have been done at other companies and products before - yet Tesla pushed the experience mainstream.
Exactly, they are asking for technology that can shift their industry. They aren't asking for Tesla's baggage any more than a request for "Uber for X" implies they want a company that will ignore regulatory requirements.
Tesla started as a luxury brand (Roadster and then luxury sedans) and the only innovation they have managed is name recognition; even the adoption they have driven in the US has been mostly trough public policy like tax incentives.
Because very few people will know what you are talking about if you go up to a random person and ask them about Lada or BYD.
Musk is an egomaniacal idiot that most of us dislike. There are countless valid reasons to dislike Tesla as a company and the cars they make. However, that shouldn't cause people to overthink things when their name is simply being used as shorthand as it clearly is in this instance.
Tesla is indeed a strange choice for a simile, considering that Tesla cars use prodigious amounts of energy compared to other electric cars, or other cars in general. I doubt they're even more environmentally friendly overall than a compact combustion engine car. Tesla made electric cool by building an over the top luxury car, what we really need is the opposite.
There are some cars coming out next year that are more energy efficient than a Tesla, like the Hyundai Ioniq 6, but I don't know of any currently widely available vehicles that are.
By energy efficient do you mean kilowatt hours / kilometer (or equivalent units)? The standard range Model 3 – the most efficient one – is apparently 15/16 kWh per 100km, which is pretty much exactly the same as a VW ID3 (15.5 - 15.7 in Pro spec) and only a little less than a Hyundai Ioniq 5 (16.8).
A tesla weighs 2-3 times more than a compact car, so that means it must be extremely efficient pound for pound. Nevertheless, I doubt many people, until recently, bought Tesla's because of (ostensible) environmental concerns.
If you can move a heavy object using less energy than others move a much lighter object, then it would seem that you are quite efficient. Unless we're talking about constant speed in a vacuum.
But think of the shareholder value they could accrue.
Honestly, I'm not very mad at instant ink because the printer market was so broken. A subscription for another appliance would be pretty maddening, though.
I came here to post this as well. For one, it doesn't even make sense. Tesla is a car manufacturer and makes objectively worse cars than the competition. They just happen to be EVs. Making any thing "Tesla" inside my house means it will be flashy but work less well than existing solutions, in addition to removing all knobs. All of which is the opposite of what I want. I've already de-smartified my Nests because, surprise, they aren't actually smart and end up being worse than me controlling them.
Note that that ranking only compares against other EVs, of which there aren't that many yet, and that Kia's new model, which has only been out for a year, is already above Tesla. I have said this for years, and it's been clear to me that Tesla cannot compete against traditional car makers moving into the EV space.
Consumer Reports ranks Tesla at either the bottom or second to last when compared against all other car manufacturers.
Tesla is pretty high on reliability, just not quality (ie. panel gaps and build quality issues are still a thing, but based on CR they're on-par with all the other non-luxury car brands).
They are rated low on both reliability and quality. Consumer Reports rates them second to last in reliability. And Tesla has for years done warranty work as "goodwill repairs" to hide how bad their reliability is.
For one, their interior is rather unluxurious considering the price tag relative to other EVs. The only thing it's got going for it is the tablet screen, which was cool back in the day but today anyone can install an aftermarket one in their old beater.
If someone wants to buy a Tesla because they truly like it or the brand, they're the only ones who can decide the right answer for them. I personally don't get it. There are way better options now in my eyes; it's just they're uncool brand names like Subaru and Hyundai.
The engineering tolerances are not good -- ie. you can stick a pen between the body panels. Can't do that with a Toyota or Honda, for example.
The interior is spartan. My $40,000 minivan has more interior features for passengers than a $140,000 Model X.
The tablet controls. They are unsafe as they make you take your eyes off the road. Cars still need physical buttons for critical control systems and systems that consumers need to control often (radio, climate control, windshield wipers, cruise control, etc.).
Build quality -- Tesla's are known for having cheap parts and parts that fall off or break easily or just wear out quickly.
I agree with pretty much all of this but if any governing body(whether it be the manufacturer or government) cared about screens and how detrimental they are to safety and driving, you wouldn't see every other person gawking at their phone while driving 70mph.
> Cars still need physical buttons for critical control systems and systems that consumers need to control often (radio, climate control, windshield wipers, cruise control, etc.).
Radio - volume and track control are physical, more technical stuff can be done by voice or simple touch screen touches. For folks who say “I don’t do voice, but I demand physical controls”, I humbly suggest that using voice is safer than anything physical in terms of maintaining focus on the road.
Climate control - voice or simple, easy-to-access touch controls.
Windshield wipers - physical or voice, voice or touch to adjust if necessary. “Auto” makes can make this a set it and forget it feature.
> unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners
I'm an owner and I have a lot of confidence in autopilot. Generally, if it's possible to use autopilot on the road I'm on, I do. So that's one owner you're witnessing who's not part of that "unanimous".
Isn't the big problem with smart appliances exactly this?
I was in the market for a new pellet grill recently and I ran into huge problems, almost everything on the market is bluetooth this or wifi that. The last thing I need is an unreliable radio to be at the center of the controls for my outdoor appliance, or for any appliance whatsoever, to have a dependency on my internet connection and the availability of some manufacturers servers.
Because who know what might happen. The manufacturer might decide it doesn't like your hardware anymore and push out a firmware update that bricks all your devices in 60 days, but don't worry, they'll give you a coupon for buying the latest and greatest from them (looking at you sonos).
Want to know how to not get me to buy your product? Make it dependent on some unreliable technology that gives no benefit to the device, but makes the device dependent on the goodwill of the parent corporation.
What's amazing is the failed potential of these devices that do include things like Bluetooth and WiFi. In so many cases, they sporadically fail to pair with their respective apps, or are slow to pair, if they can reliably pair at all. Even when the connection works, you'd better hope the app actually alerts you when your food is ready or whatever. Whooops, our API returned a 500! Our bad, bruh!
I'm particularly baffled because, in my experience designing and manufacturing my own PCB with a BLE IC on it, integrating something like BLE and having it work reliably doesn't seem that difficult. BLE is an annoyingly complicated standard, but it's by no means impossible to work with. The app I wrote could pair with the device instantly and reliably stay connected while receiving data in real time. I don't get why other BLE devices I've owned have issues while my pissant attempt had none of them. If it's BLE, you can count on seeing some loading spinners frequently unless it's being paired with another devices designed specifically for it (like a game console).
The only wireless digital technologies I've found are beneficial are WiFi internet and Bluetooth audio (which is still awful in most cases but AirPods work OK). Everything else ends up being a gimmick, more of a hassle, and even a trojan horse for more privacy violations.
> unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners
You must talk to a very narrow band of Tesla owners.
Auto pilot is basically enhanced cruise control, and Tesla do this quite well.
If you’re referring to fulls self driving (FSD), then I agree. FSD is best seen as slightly advanced autopilot (it can change lanes, etc.) and self-parking in very tight spots like small garages. The FSD name is largely a misnomer, and it has given the features that have been implemented well (listed above) a very bad name.
Related to the request and your comment, I personally wish that home appliances would have Tesla-esque features, just without the Elon over-promising bluster.
Well, if YC is positioning themselves as "helping to solve the problem" I think it's completely valid to call them out for previously "helping to create the problem", in a humorous way.
Because YC and other VC shops wouldn't shut the fuck up about crypto, web3, and blockchain across 2020-2021 and that sort of behavior doesn't get a free pass. Now they've moved onto Generative AI.
"Carbon removal credits on the blockchain. Using blockchain technology to solve the double-counting of carbon credits is an attractive idea but in our experience it’s just a technology choice and a small piece of the product you ultimately have to build."
YC has generated enough wealth from these and other endless consumption ideas for a thousand lifetimes. The billionaire's playbook now dictates you focus on building your legacy by using disruptive technology to save the world.
A great list to start with yet there are still several items missing from their projected speculations. As a core software architect and founder who has built multiple acquired ecommerce systems prior to and since the dotcom bust long ago I feel it prudent to emphasize to those that lack the experience to see what is happening yet again in an even more critical modern societal industry. The coming energy opportunities for those entrepreneurs among us here that possess the appropriate subject matter knowledge across hardware and software is significant, I cannot state it enough, “extremely significant”. Should you have the tenacity and drive to create and build something which others state is not possible then there is no time like the present to start and prove them wrong as every living person NEEDS energy. Who knows, maybe along the way you even enjoy the journey and make a little income too.
I unfortunately regret to disappoint you that a living breathing homo sapien wrote this, me. My writing style is mine and mine alone although GPT could very well imitate my style but in this case it did not.
4 Gt is roughly all the anthropogenic CH4, responsible for about a third (or possibly a half) of temperature rise. After that we will continue at a lower level in order to keep curating the level and as a precaution against methane bursts.
4 Gt of CH4 is considered roughly equivalent to 120 Gt of CO2
Fascinating - saving the planet by adding iron chloride to the mix of pollutants emitted by diesel-powered tanker ships in order to convert methane into CO2. I can't imagine many more ways in which the approach could be unintuitive, but if it works and the side effects are thoroughly understood, I appreciate the pragmatism!
> Carbon removal credits on the blockchain. Using blockchain technology to solve the double-counting of carbon credits is an attractive idea but in our experience it’s just a technology choice and a small piece of the product you ultimately have to build.
I can't believe how often I hear this reasoning from people: Carbon credits have a double-counting problem? Blockchains prevent "double-spend"! Perfect solution! But as the quote points out, double-counting of carbon credits is not a software problem.
Are high-margin luxury products really going to decarbonize the world? It seems pretty rare for companies that start on that path to move downmarket, but isn't that what we need to fight climate change?
Attempting to solve climate change with virtue-signalling consumption and production is worse than useless. That doesn't mean such things are necessarily bad startup ideas, though, but few things turn me off more than this sort of thing.
Those generative AI companies aren't exactly lean on energy usage either. It's about capturing the IRA money, which to their credit they are very up front about. Maybe something good will come out of it, after all, that's the point of the government spending! If they save the world purely out of self interest then we still get the saved world...
And what about when they take the government money and start doing innovative work, then once the funding dries up they realize that bitcoin mining is more profitable after all and promptly switch back to that. That's the problem with putting public good in the hands of private entities who have their next quarterly report to worry about and not much else.
I'm going to throw this out there: most of the promising companies in this space are likely going to get their seed funding from federal grants rather than incubators like YC. You may not be seeing deal flow because your product is unattractive to them in comparison.
Whether they want their piece and whether the companies want to give it to them are two different stories. I expect that series A/B investors with $5 million to throw in at a $25 million valuation are getting a lot of deal flow here, since that's larger than a grant will reasonably get you. The seed stage is where an appropriately-sized chunk of government money is still readily available, especially if you are a spin-off of a well-known research group. This realistically means that in things like battery technology and carbon capture, YC and other seed funds will get the dregs.
- stop burning fossil fuels to the altar of the crypto crazy
- stop burning enormous amounts of fossil fuel to produce AI models that poorly replicate human skills, without asking if someone wanted it
- support power efficient devices or appliances. I despise Apple, for a lot of reasons, but the M series is a big step in the right direction.
- don't buy Teslas, buy small cars that occupy a small parking space, if you live in a city. Better yet, don't buy a car, car companies will die eventually, better sooner than later, so we can make them a thing of the past like we did with horsecars. All of us would feel dumb riding or buying one of those nowadays, right?
- support companies that actually do what they say, "90% recycled material" or "90% carbon neutral" is a brand, it's green washing, it's almost never true for large corporations. It will take the aforementioned Apple at least another 20 years to become really green, as in CO2 neutral and as of their actions had no terrible consequences on real people, in the real World.
- The only ADV I was able to endure in the past 20 years was "buy better, wear for longer" by Levis. Which is actually a very good thing to do for the environment and for ourselves as humans. Fast fashion is stupid.
there's a bit of regulatory problems in Europe[1] about that, cars need to adhere to certain emission standards to circulate in large areas of big cities, but definitely fix before buying is the old way that becomes new again.
In this light the right to repair is very important.
Although I'm betting it's better to just radically cut demand rather than try to invent a really good carbon-neutral/negative concrete. If we could sink a whole bunch of carbon into concrete though (significant carbon capture -> magic? -> concrete), that would be cool though.
That's a really uncomfortable fact with a lot of climate issues: it's way better to just not do the thing instead of trying to find a neutral/net-negative carbon process for the thing.
Hybrid water heaters, active anode rods, and adaptive timing seem very revolutionary already. The other revolutionary aspect would be smaller point of use instant heaters that the world except the US use.
Tldr; a lot of existing innovation exists that the US isn't purchasing.
1. We know for a fact that mangroves can mitigate tsunami damage. I've been looking into this and a lot of tree-planting programs really suck and are basically failures. Additionally mangroves are tropical plants and -- so far -- I am failing to find an alternative for colder climates.
2. We certainly need energy solutions and I'm happy to see people work on that, but we could use more companies working on passive solar solutions as well. Most passive solar solutions are best implemented from the get go (from breaking ground on a new building), but some can be added after the fact. There is likely lots of low-hanging fruit in that second category.
3. Middle-eastern countries and their architectural traditions have many practices that help mitigate heat levels inside buildings and even at street level. These seem to be largely unknown outside such countries and we are missing a huge opportunity to export or adapt such traditions to other places to try to adapt to hotter temps.
re: mangrove forests, there's a company I'm following that is working on replanting them as part of a permaculture solution: https://regenerativeresources.co/
Big fan of your products :) Have bought a dozen of them personally.
From what I understand, excess solar is more common in markets that have asymmetric import/export prices, like Australia, that strongly incentivize self-consumption vs. exporting back to the grid. CA is likely to implement this with NEM 3.0 so we are likely to start seeing this shift in behavior in the US soon as well. Right now there isn't much of an economic incentive to do excess solar in markets with symmetric NEM compensation (I'm sure you know all of this).
Other problem we have in the US vs. AU is our cost of installation is so high that it makes oversizing systems somewhat cost prohibitive, which is what you'd need to do to get enough excess solar to charge an EV.
Third problem is where cars are parked during the day while the sun is shining, which may be tough for people who commute to work. Energy storage can obviously help here somewhat.
I've worked in "climate intelligence" for many years. The list overlooks one of the largest and most immediate opportunities around that market: the data infrastructure and analysis tools we have today are profoundly unfit for purpose. Just about everyone is essentially using cartography tools to do large-scale spatiotemporal analysis of sensor and telemetry data. The gaps for both features and practical scalability are massive.
It has made most of the climate intelligence analysis we'd like to do, and for which data is available, intractable. And what we can do is so computationally inefficient that we figuratively burn down a small forest every time we run an analysis on a non-trivial model, which isn't very green either.
(This is definitely something I'd work on if I had the bandwidth, it is a pretty pure deep tech software problem.)
I hesitate to link to Twitter here, but Joe Morrison has his finger on the pulse of this and offers a tongue-in-cheek perspective that I appreciate: https://twitter.com/mouthofmorrison
Out of curiosity, is accessing & working with large datasets a problem in your areas of work? I run a weather/climate site that makes some of this less painful, taking datasets such as GFS or ERA5/ERA5-Land much faster to access. We have some enterprise clients who really value the time-saving aspect of this but I also feel like everyone has their own data-processing set up and problems are different for everyone.
There are a couple issues I see with basic access and working with large datasets. Ease of access for typical users is also a valid issue.
First, we still mostly move the data to the computation when we should be moving the computation to the data. Moving the data works fine when data is small but if the data volumes are large (as sensor/geo data tends to be) then it can take an incredibly long time to move the data. In many cases, more time is spent shoveling data over the network than actually doing the computation. This has become worse as storage density has increased, hundreds of TB/server is ordinary.
Second, the data is rarely organized in a way that makes it efficient to extract arbitrary subsets. There is still a lot of what is essentially "grep at scale" going on. Again, not a problem if the data is small but if I need a specific 50TB subset of a 10PB source, this becomes prohibitively slow. The data needs to be organized such that we can slice and dice it with high selectivity in place, much more like a proper database and less of a distributed filesystem. Because spatiotemporal analysis tends to involve iterative join-like operations, you want this to be efficient as possible.
The other big problem is many of these data sources are too large for everyone to have their own copy. Or if they did have their own copy, it would be extraordinarily wasteful. This is adjacent to the first issue. EDIT: And herein is the likely business model.
Want to make sure you're familiar with the Pangeo community: www.pangeo.io
I don't think any of these challenges are "solved", but there's a groundswell of technology that is well-situated to make a big impact in these domains. The largest barriers that still remain are the ownership of engineering processes/workflow to transform larger gridded datasets to ARCO (analysis-ready, cloud-optimized) formats, as well as tooling to mediate between heterogeneous datasets (e.g. combining regular vs irregular or arbitrarily gridded data, such as land surveys or ZIP codes).
There are definitely players in the space working on these, but much is left to be done here.
+1 for Pangeo. We use these toolsets heavily (Xarray, Zarr, Dask) to run our service, which is essentially what you described as taking the larger gridded datasest to ARCO format. I think this is still a bit too heavy for casual Excel/GIS analysts so we try to make it as simple as possible for them to get climate data in CSV or NetCDF format for their work.
This sounds really interesting. Would be really interested to work around these things. Thinking and working a lot with similar-ish systems. But not sure how to enter the related green-tech space when living in Europe. Would love to try to build a product myself but then I need a customer to try ideas with.
We are building data storage and processing infrastructure at a company that connects DERs. This involves storing large amounts of structured, time-series data. This data is then further processed and used for all kinds use cases, many of which were mentioned in the first half of the post's article. (e.g. energy management systems, load management etc.)
Any chance you guys provide a free api for the little guy? I would love to have access to climate data via a json rest api. Specifically historical temperature and precipitation data at minimum.
I poked around a while back and wasn't able to find much of anything on the web. Maybe I missed it?
Certainly - take a look (https://oikolab.com) and let me know your use case. There is a free tier but we've also given free access to a quite a few number of researchers, non-profits and university students for their projects when they reached out to us.
Sounds good - can you sign up for the free tier and send me an email to support@oikolab.com? This comes to me so I'll know which account belongs to you and we can take it from there.
I would also love any references to existing companies, research groups, or the problems in this space if you have the time to share. I found the posted list underwhelming and more of a marketing shotgun approach to try and take advantage of the push for "climate tech" but not solve any real problems.
This is an excellent point. I think the problem is that because it's such a pure software problem it doesn't have an immediate "climate tech" alignment, so it stands to "dilute" these kinds of calls for funding.
Companies with good climate intelligence tech tend to evolve in to marketplaces because that gets them closer to the money. Climate projects can't afford SaaS, but offset buyers are willing to pay a premium for offsets re-verified by high-tech climate intelligence SaaS.
I guess it would help to be more specific about how this differs from some of the measurement related startups they list. Taxonomies are difficult, so maybe they do need an entirely separate category, or enlarge the one related to measurement.
> Just about everyone is essentially using cartography tools to do large-scale spatiotemporal analysis of sensor and telemetry data. The gaps for both features and practical scalability are massive.
Could you point to any readings or resources that would explain these gaps? I'd be quite curious why our current spatiotemporal analysis techniques would be insufficient. Is it the analysis tools that just need new techniques or is the problem at the source (i.e. the sensors)? Or?
There aren’t really any problems. Some people see that because all of this data can be spatially and temporarily referenced, it can be accessed better, as if there could be one format and one application that could let you do anything you want across the space time, regardless of the source.
The reality is that a lots of models using this data are developed against a specific sensor or dataset, and just don’t work or scale.
I don’t think this will be solved in this domain by pangeo or any startup in particular.
There is an awesome new STACspec that every geo company should be adopting, and that’s the direction to move towards.
But each step towards standardizing the GIS process will require something that truly everyone can adopt, sort of like JSON.
Would you mind elaborating on say a few specific asks for tools climate people would want to have, that are low-hanging fruit that people might be able to write in their spare time?
I'm very interested in doing something for climate change but I'd like to know what people want.
Don't think of it as a "climate intelligence" system. It is really an "analyze complex dynamics in the physical world at global scale" system, one application of which is climate intelligence. Everything is fundamentally anchored to space and time, and connected by it.
The applicability cuts across industries. It would enable managing many kinds of risks that have nothing to do with climate.
Makes sense. Although to have such a big scope and understand how to satisfy such cross cutting concerns where tools aren't built yet it sounds like you you kind of need to understand a lot about everything.
I do see that when you really understand the problem you can build such a tool in a non-domain specific way as you describe without inconceivable effort but understanding up to that point is kind of the whole problem?
Edit: Btw, really sounds like a space where I would like to build stuff in. I kind of understand what you're aiming for but I feel like it's very easy to jump to conclusions and build air castles.
We need sensors for carbon presence over distance and time in the ocean. At huge scale, to test the viability of various carbon sequestration schemes. That's pretty expensive, with a large non-software component.
I know this from a peripheral involvement in one the XPRIZE projects.
Agree 100%. This is big part of the motivation behind our new startup Earthmover: https://earthmover.io/
Our mission is to make it easier to work with scientific data at scale in the cloud, focusing mainly on the climate, weather, and geospatial vertical.
My cofounder Joe Hamman and I are climate scientists who helped create the Pangeo project. We are also core devs on the Python packages Xarray and Zarr. We think that a layer of managed services (think a "modern data stack" oriented around the multidimensional array data model) is exactly what this ecosystem needs to make it easier for teams to build data-intensive products in the climate-tech space.
I'm curious, have you considered using PyTorch or JAX for tensor processing? ML libraries seem to be much further along when it comes to performing compute-intensive, hardware-accelerated operations on Tensor's. And you get gradients basically for free (in terms of developer time). Also, the kernel compiler being added PyTorch 2 looks very promising.
PyTorch and JAX are used heavily in climate science on the ML side. For more general analytics, not so much. Many of our users like to use Xarray as a high-level API. There has been some work to integrate Xarray with PyTorch (https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/3232) but we're not there yet.
The primary issue in this domain is not compute - it's I/O, especially when you need to perform complex computations with intermediate data that doesn't fit into memory.
Many lessons to be learned from Climate Corporation. They used satellite data and drones to make robust crop insurance and ended up being bought by Monsanto and changing their direction.
There's still some politicss to overcome, but if the cheapest source of energy is low carbon then the problem is mostly solved in the big picture. As long as we don't hit too many tipping points we should be okay.
While low carbon electricity might be the cheapest source of energy on spot markets, that's a really tiny part of the picture. We still need to figure out large scale storage and electrify everything, those aren't solved problems.
But let's assume we solve them. Do we have enough metallic resources on Earth that we can extract cheaply? Do we have enough cheap fossil fuels left to actually do that?
New sources of energy have made the world consume more of the old ones, not less. Same thing with technological innovation and gains in energy efficiency.
Public policy >> tech solutions. You might get a few people to replace their water heaters if you come up with one more efficient, but that's nothing compared to federally funded nuclear plants.
Innovation in nuclear has made it politically viable in the first place. If we still had to use 1970s nuclear tech it would be a hard sell.
In any case, I’m always skeptical of “we can’t do X without doing Y” arguments because they’re usually about making the perfect the enemy of the good rather than X actually being precluded by not having Y.
Interesting position. Are you suggesting that the solution will not involve innovation, or that climate change is unsolvable?
As an employee at a climate tech company, I think the primary roadblock is simply investing resources (money and time) in the various solutions available to us. A ton of innovation is happening along the way (e.g. first ever net positive fusion ignition yesterday) but even without much innovation, we could solve the problems by directing our resources at them.
In other words, I think climate change is very solvable and that innovation along the way is constant and inevitable. I'm not saying that we will definitely make the necessary investments to succeed, which I think might be your point? But as this post demonstrates, the rate of investment is improving significantly.
I'm not convinced that the solutions to climate change are tech related. If anything, climate change is tech driven.
Addressing climate change doesn't really require startups and venture capitalist pump and dump schemes. It requires social and behavioral changes, mainly centered around consumption. Basically everything on this list would increase consumption, manufacturing, construction, road building, etc.
There are many, many known solutions to climate change that do not require any new science or technology. We just don't want to do them. Lists like these are really just trying to invent new tech and science that allows us to keep current levels of consumption.
> It requires social and behavioral changes, mainly centered around consumption.
So far it seems these changes are going to be impossible to achieve. Like you say we just don't want to do them. Current levels of consumption will continue, and increase.
So given that as a prior what are how do you approach the problem? If we can't change human behaviour can we innovate our way out of the problem?
I think that's part of my larger point that companies and startups simply cannot solve this problem and are really part of the problem. Governments could mandate and incentivize changes, but companies would come kicking and screaming.
> If we can't change human behaviour can we innovate our way out of the problem?
Most human innovations have increased climate change. I have little optimism that we can suddenly adjust the dial. And capitalism is simply at odds with reducing or even moderating consumption.
If you ever want to stop wallowing in misanthropic nihilism, I recommend reading books like "More From Less" - Mcafee which shows that capitalism does in fact reduce/moderate consumption. Next look at "Speed and Scale" - Doerr, or "How to Solve a Climate Disaster" - Gates for a giant list of human innovations that will in fact decrease/reverse climate change.
Aside from the needless labeling, thank you for the references. I will take a look. However, count me initially skeptical of some of the claims. I simply have not seen any data that would corroborate what seems to be the thesis of More From Less. Even if "more from less" is true, doing so at scale is still more. But I will read more. I do note the following quote from a review of More From Less:
> In a positive note, the author is very clear that market fundamentalism - letting capitalism run amok - is emphatically NOT an answer to the environmental crises, and that we need a strong state to regulate and control the private interests, repair market failures and price the externalities. ... That said, I've already noticed that many proponents of this book haven't noticed these caveats, and instead claim that McAfee suggests unbridled capitalism is "the" answer.
And to be clear, I am not opposed to environmentalism and acting on climate change. In fact it's quite the opposite. I do what I can with composting, recycling, native plant restoration and conservation on my property, and my donations. However, I am indeed quite cynical when VCs suddenly want to ride the green wave, and I don't see much of a coherent plan in the post here aside from a shotgun approach to simply making money through investments of a "hot" area.
Theoretically, if we can drive the carbon footprint per captia down far enough such that the carbon footprint of 10 billion people is lower than the rate of carbon removal (natural and artifical), then we're fine.
Definitely a hard problem, but so is restructuring society into a non-capitalist, non-consumption based system.
So I think the "coherent plan" is to accelerate this decrease in carbon per captia. It's trending the right way but too slowly. But perhaps with the power of the market's exponential growth, if we incentivize it the right way, it will accelerate this in a way to avoid total collapse.
It's sad to see such comments systematically downvoted on HN. I understand most people on here (including me) are paid to believe otherwise but you should really look at the history of tech and energy for the past 200 years or so, and also listen to competent people (i.e. not Musk nor PG) about the energy and geological resources challenges we're facing. Even if you don't care about climate change at all.
The problem unsolved in practice is post-wiring. A neat device would be a robotic remote controlled drill that can work itself through brick walls vertically from floor to floor (including steel-reinforced concrete ceilings) and in curves if needed.
Hugely expensive toy, but creating no dirt, compared to classic methods of adding more wires.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 49.4 ms ] threadSome of these are "let's take an unrelated industry and try to cram climate into its story", others are ideas that are doomed to fail. And the "if only forests existed forever they would be a better carbon sink" argument is so flawed I am disappointed to see it at all.
But, also a lot of good projects to work on in there.
Yes, sequestration can go negative-carbon, but that doesn't help anybody who has a difficult to replace fuel burning process.
If we can extract and burn and extract and burn and keep going with that loop (without dinosaur input), then all that extract-burn cycle is zero-carbon.
We can then separately decide to pump some of that cycle’s output into easy liquid storage, thus going carbon-negative.
https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/fuels-us-euro...
https://terraformindustries.com/
Shipping is a huge component of the price of natural gas. So it'll be a long time before they're cheaper than the price of natural gas in Alberta or Siberia, but they'll be able to beat the price in Los Angeles a lot sooner.
Reminds me of this previous initiative:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence
Nuclear energy can't solve the problem on its own either, because you still need plants to deal with rapid changes in demand. We shouldn't be working towards a silver bullet, we should be using a lot of different technologies together to solve the problem.
Nuclear can also follow loads, but there's no economical need to build them to do that (in almost any market).
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-about-...
Solar and wind occupy way more land for the same power production and can’t produce baseload power without battery storage systems that cost 5x as much.
As I understand it, a substantial portion of the biomass is wood pellets. These are harvested from the American south causing deforestation, are transported over the ocean with non-negligible emissions, and then burned in non-clean stacks releasing carbon, but they are accounted for as green. So you get a dirty burn, dirty transportation, and deforest a region as part of these numbers.
A quick search turned up this article: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/07/us/american-south-bi...
Its hard for me to accept that this narrative is correct, but I've struggled to find anything that explains how EU's biomass is net good for the environment. Do you have any insight?
Edit: wow, since I'm receiving instant downvotes, here's the evidence.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
You've nailed it. The people in power don't want to fix these problems. They'd like them to get worse, actually. "Never let a crisis go to waste" has the corollary "if a crisis doesn't exist, create one."
But many other sectors need to be electrified for nuclear power to have its decarbonization impact: buildings, industry, transportation etc.
Today, most things are done the most economical way. And that might involve emitting carbon.
A country which regulates the emissions of carbon will end up producing goods and services using carbon free methods - but those methods will often be less economically efficient than the carbon producing method, even at scale.
So any country that goes all in on the carbon-free world will end up economically worse off -- it's goods won't be competitive in the global marketplace. A government cannot subsidize itself to competitiveness in all markets.
Solve that problem, and the world will decarbonize itself almost overnight.
https://www.ft.com/content/51e6bd85-dbb2-4071-b635-8ab9bd2ab...
* All countries to agree on an incentive scheme (unlikely - although big trading blocs like EU/China/Russia/USA might be able to bully the rest of the world into it with the threat of sanctions if they do not agree)
* Some countries to agree on a scheme, and to break WTO rules to penalize (carbon tax) imports and subsidize exports to/from those who do not.
Or... the world continues on the current trajectory of decarbonizing highly visible things only (Electric cars, solar panels on the roof!) to appease voters while avoiding decarbonizing anything that much affects nationwide competitiveness (eg. steel/fertilizer production).
Having said that, a CO2 tax just makes the financial incentives for change better; someone still needs to build the better system after funds are reallocated. So if you already started a cost-reduction startup, you’ll have first-mover advantage when the CO2 taxes come into play.
Isn't this just the tragedy of the commons writ large?
It makes no sense for anyone really to make personal sacrifices for the planet. Why should I stay at home riding my pushbike to the artisan markets when my neighbour will gleefully fly to Hawaii for his holidays, undoing in a few days whatever carbon reductions I've achieved in a year?
The logical course is to accept that your actions mean nothing and live a greedy life, amassing wealth at the cost of the planet's health and hoarding it for when things get bad, whether that's this generation or the next.
> Tesla-like experience for home energy management: smart hub, including smart charging, load shifting, software-based load shedding for improved resiliency, and better circuit-level energy use measurement.
With how Tesla vehicles are rated, and the unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners, no way in hell am I do I want to "Teslify" everything in my home. In order to prove that there's something wrong with the current consumer experience, you have to bring an example to show it. So far, I've only seen ways to further add more surveillance and advertising into everyday people's lives, not to mention the increased disposability of appliances. No thanks.
The brand has enough baggage by now that the second-highest comment chain is about its unsuitability as an ideal, rather than discussing the content itself.
Tesla helped push ICE to EV even though technologically some of the efforts may have been done at other companies and products before - yet Tesla pushed the experience mainstream.
https://www.reckontalk.com/electro-russian-tesla-first-elect...
The biggest manufacturer of electric cars worldwide is BYD
The biggest driver of sales (trough public policy) has been China and Europe, including things like announcing bans of ICE in city centers/cities:
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Electric_car_use_by_country
Tesla started as a luxury brand (Roadster and then luxury sedans) and the only innovation they have managed is name recognition; even the adoption they have driven in the US has been mostly trough public policy like tax incentives.
Musk is an egomaniacal idiot that most of us dislike. There are countless valid reasons to dislike Tesla as a company and the cars they make. However, that shouldn't cause people to overthink things when their name is simply being used as shorthand as it clearly is in this instance.
This is why parent said only innovation Tesla has managed is name recognition.
Honestly, I'm not very mad at instant ink because the printer market was so broken. A subscription for another appliance would be pretty maddening, though.
Consumer Reports ranks Tesla at either the bottom or second to last when compared against all other car manufacturers.
If someone wants to buy a Tesla because they truly like it or the brand, they're the only ones who can decide the right answer for them. I personally don't get it. There are way better options now in my eyes; it's just they're uncool brand names like Subaru and Hyundai.
The interior is spartan. My $40,000 minivan has more interior features for passengers than a $140,000 Model X.
The tablet controls. They are unsafe as they make you take your eyes off the road. Cars still need physical buttons for critical control systems and systems that consumers need to control often (radio, climate control, windshield wipers, cruise control, etc.).
Build quality -- Tesla's are known for having cheap parts and parts that fall off or break easily or just wear out quickly.
Radio - volume and track control are physical, more technical stuff can be done by voice or simple touch screen touches. For folks who say “I don’t do voice, but I demand physical controls”, I humbly suggest that using voice is safer than anything physical in terms of maintaining focus on the road.
Climate control - voice or simple, easy-to-access touch controls.
Windshield wipers - physical or voice, voice or touch to adjust if necessary. “Auto” makes can make this a set it and forget it feature.
Cruise control - physical
I'm an owner and I have a lot of confidence in autopilot. Generally, if it's possible to use autopilot on the road I'm on, I do. So that's one owner you're witnessing who's not part of that "unanimous".
I was in the market for a new pellet grill recently and I ran into huge problems, almost everything on the market is bluetooth this or wifi that. The last thing I need is an unreliable radio to be at the center of the controls for my outdoor appliance, or for any appliance whatsoever, to have a dependency on my internet connection and the availability of some manufacturers servers.
Because who know what might happen. The manufacturer might decide it doesn't like your hardware anymore and push out a firmware update that bricks all your devices in 60 days, but don't worry, they'll give you a coupon for buying the latest and greatest from them (looking at you sonos).
Want to know how to not get me to buy your product? Make it dependent on some unreliable technology that gives no benefit to the device, but makes the device dependent on the goodwill of the parent corporation.
I'm particularly baffled because, in my experience designing and manufacturing my own PCB with a BLE IC on it, integrating something like BLE and having it work reliably doesn't seem that difficult. BLE is an annoyingly complicated standard, but it's by no means impossible to work with. The app I wrote could pair with the device instantly and reliably stay connected while receiving data in real time. I don't get why other BLE devices I've owned have issues while my pissant attempt had none of them. If it's BLE, you can count on seeing some loading spinners frequently unless it's being paired with another devices designed specifically for it (like a game console).
The only wireless digital technologies I've found are beneficial are WiFi internet and Bluetooth audio (which is still awful in most cases but AirPods work OK). Everything else ends up being a gimmick, more of a hassle, and even a trojan horse for more privacy violations.
You must talk to a very narrow band of Tesla owners.
Auto pilot is basically enhanced cruise control, and Tesla do this quite well.
If you’re referring to fulls self driving (FSD), then I agree. FSD is best seen as slightly advanced autopilot (it can change lanes, etc.) and self-parking in very tight spots like small garages. The FSD name is largely a misnomer, and it has given the features that have been implemented well (listed above) a very bad name.
Related to the request and your comment, I personally wish that home appliances would have Tesla-esque features, just without the Elon over-promising bluster.
"Carbon removal credits on the blockchain. Using blockchain technology to solve the double-counting of carbon credits is an attractive idea but in our experience it’s just a technology choice and a small piece of the product you ultimately have to build."
4 Gt is roughly all the anthropogenic CH4, responsible for about a third (or possibly a half) of temperature rise. After that we will continue at a lower level in order to keep curating the level and as a precaution against methane bursts.
4 Gt of CH4 is considered roughly equivalent to 120 Gt of CO2
Do you have evidence that it works in-situ, or any ideas of how to test this in an observable way? If so, there are folks interested.
(I run a climate engineering group to help accelerate mitigation/removal methods.)
Can you say more about your group?
> Carbon removal credits on the blockchain. Using blockchain technology to solve the double-counting of carbon credits is an attractive idea but in our experience it’s just a technology choice and a small piece of the product you ultimately have to build.
I can't believe how often I hear this reasoning from people: Carbon credits have a double-counting problem? Blockchains prevent "double-spend"! Perfect solution! But as the quote points out, double-counting of carbon credits is not a software problem.
At Jasmine, we're tokenizing climate assets but not to prevent "double-spend." https://medium.com/jasmine-energy/why-is-jasmine-building-on...
https://www.svb.com/industry-insights/clean-tech-sustainabil...
- stop burning fossil fuels to the altar of the crypto crazy
- stop burning enormous amounts of fossil fuel to produce AI models that poorly replicate human skills, without asking if someone wanted it
- support power efficient devices or appliances. I despise Apple, for a lot of reasons, but the M series is a big step in the right direction.
- don't buy Teslas, buy small cars that occupy a small parking space, if you live in a city. Better yet, don't buy a car, car companies will die eventually, better sooner than later, so we can make them a thing of the past like we did with horsecars. All of us would feel dumb riding or buying one of those nowadays, right?
- support companies that actually do what they say, "90% recycled material" or "90% carbon neutral" is a brand, it's green washing, it's almost never true for large corporations. It will take the aforementioned Apple at least another 20 years to become really green, as in CO2 neutral and as of their actions had no terrible consequences on real people, in the real World.
- The only ADV I was able to endure in the past 20 years was "buy better, wear for longer" by Levis. Which is actually a very good thing to do for the environment and for ourselves as humans. Fast fashion is stupid.
there's a bit of regulatory problems in Europe[1] about that, cars need to adhere to certain emission standards to circulate in large areas of big cities, but definitely fix before buying is the old way that becomes new again.
In this light the right to repair is very important.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards
Feels like there's already options there.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a4078516...
https://cen.acs.org/materials/Chemex-goes-global-carbon-neut...
Although I'm betting it's better to just radically cut demand rather than try to invent a really good carbon-neutral/negative concrete. If we could sink a whole bunch of carbon into concrete though (significant carbon capture -> magic? -> concrete), that would be cool though.
That's a really uncomfortable fact with a lot of climate issues: it's way better to just not do the thing instead of trying to find a neutral/net-negative carbon process for the thing.
Tldr; a lot of existing innovation exists that the US isn't purchasing.
1. We know for a fact that mangroves can mitigate tsunami damage. I've been looking into this and a lot of tree-planting programs really suck and are basically failures. Additionally mangroves are tropical plants and -- so far -- I am failing to find an alternative for colder climates.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051028141252.h...
2. We certainly need energy solutions and I'm happy to see people work on that, but we could use more companies working on passive solar solutions as well. Most passive solar solutions are best implemented from the get go (from breaking ground on a new building), but some can be added after the fact. There is likely lots of low-hanging fruit in that second category.
3. Middle-eastern countries and their architectural traditions have many practices that help mitigate heat levels inside buildings and even at street level. These seem to be largely unknown outside such countries and we are missing a huge opportunity to export or adapt such traditions to other places to try to adapt to hotter temps.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
Emporia Energy's smart EV charger can already do this. So can our $9 smart plug. Disclosure: I work there.
From what I understand, excess solar is more common in markets that have asymmetric import/export prices, like Australia, that strongly incentivize self-consumption vs. exporting back to the grid. CA is likely to implement this with NEM 3.0 so we are likely to start seeing this shift in behavior in the US soon as well. Right now there isn't much of an economic incentive to do excess solar in markets with symmetric NEM compensation (I'm sure you know all of this).
Other problem we have in the US vs. AU is our cost of installation is so high that it makes oversizing systems somewhat cost prohibitive, which is what you'd need to do to get enough excess solar to charge an EV.
Third problem is where cars are parked during the day while the sun is shining, which may be tough for people who commute to work. Energy storage can obviously help here somewhat.
It has made most of the climate intelligence analysis we'd like to do, and for which data is available, intractable. And what we can do is so computationally inefficient that we figuratively burn down a small forest every time we run an analysis on a non-trivial model, which isn't very green either.
(This is definitely something I'd work on if I had the bandwidth, it is a pretty pure deep tech software problem.)
First, we still mostly move the data to the computation when we should be moving the computation to the data. Moving the data works fine when data is small but if the data volumes are large (as sensor/geo data tends to be) then it can take an incredibly long time to move the data. In many cases, more time is spent shoveling data over the network than actually doing the computation. This has become worse as storage density has increased, hundreds of TB/server is ordinary.
Second, the data is rarely organized in a way that makes it efficient to extract arbitrary subsets. There is still a lot of what is essentially "grep at scale" going on. Again, not a problem if the data is small but if I need a specific 50TB subset of a 10PB source, this becomes prohibitively slow. The data needs to be organized such that we can slice and dice it with high selectivity in place, much more like a proper database and less of a distributed filesystem. Because spatiotemporal analysis tends to involve iterative join-like operations, you want this to be efficient as possible.
The other big problem is many of these data sources are too large for everyone to have their own copy. Or if they did have their own copy, it would be extraordinarily wasteful. This is adjacent to the first issue. EDIT: And herein is the likely business model.
I don't think any of these challenges are "solved", but there's a groundswell of technology that is well-situated to make a big impact in these domains. The largest barriers that still remain are the ownership of engineering processes/workflow to transform larger gridded datasets to ARCO (analysis-ready, cloud-optimized) formats, as well as tooling to mediate between heterogeneous datasets (e.g. combining regular vs irregular or arbitrarily gridded data, such as land surveys or ZIP codes).
There are definitely players in the space working on these, but much is left to be done here.
I will build better risk models of extreme weather events.
If anyone is interested in joining as a co-founder, get in touch (see email in my profile).
I poked around a while back and wasn't able to find much of anything on the web. Maybe I missed it?
My use case is to attempt to predict how much water I can expect for the growing season and other growing conditions like date of last frost.
I'm trying to apply my software engineering skills to my farm. I am also researching automation strategies.
Your offering is most intriguing.
Jupiter Intelligence (https://jupiterintel.com/)
Descartes Labs (https://descarteslabs.com/)
Microsoft Planetary Computer (https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/)
Coiled (managed Dask - python HPC) (https://www.coiled.io/)
CarbonPlan (https://carbonplan.org/)
Salo Sciences (acquired by Planet, satellite imagery company) (https://salo.ai/)
lots of others
Example: Pachama https://pachama.com/
Could you point to any readings or resources that would explain these gaps? I'd be quite curious why our current spatiotemporal analysis techniques would be insufficient. Is it the analysis tools that just need new techniques or is the problem at the source (i.e. the sensors)? Or?
The reality is that a lots of models using this data are developed against a specific sensor or dataset, and just don’t work or scale.
I don’t think this will be solved in this domain by pangeo or any startup in particular.
There is an awesome new STACspec that every geo company should be adopting, and that’s the direction to move towards.
But each step towards standardizing the GIS process will require something that truly everyone can adopt, sort of like JSON.
I'm very interested in doing something for climate change but I'd like to know what people want.
The applicability cuts across industries. It would enable managing many kinds of risks that have nothing to do with climate.
I do see that when you really understand the problem you can build such a tool in a non-domain specific way as you describe without inconceivable effort but understanding up to that point is kind of the whole problem?
Edit: Btw, really sounds like a space where I would like to build stuff in. I kind of understand what you're aiming for but I feel like it's very easy to jump to conclusions and build air castles.
I know this from a peripheral involvement in one the XPRIZE projects.
Our mission is to make it easier to work with scientific data at scale in the cloud, focusing mainly on the climate, weather, and geospatial vertical.
My cofounder Joe Hamman and I are climate scientists who helped create the Pangeo project. We are also core devs on the Python packages Xarray and Zarr. We think that a layer of managed services (think a "modern data stack" oriented around the multidimensional array data model) is exactly what this ecosystem needs to make it easier for teams to build data-intensive products in the climate-tech space.
And we're hiring! https://earthmover.io/posts/earthmover-is-hiring/
The Python Array API standard should help align these different back-ends: https://data-apis.org/array-api/latest/
There's still some politicss to overcome, but if the cheapest source of energy is low carbon then the problem is mostly solved in the big picture. As long as we don't hit too many tipping points we should be okay.
While low carbon electricity might be the cheapest source of energy on spot markets, that's a really tiny part of the picture. We still need to figure out large scale storage and electrify everything, those aren't solved problems.
But let's assume we solve them. Do we have enough metallic resources on Earth that we can extract cheaply? Do we have enough cheap fossil fuels left to actually do that?
Historically there's no energy transition:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
New sources of energy have made the world consume more of the old ones, not less. Same thing with technological innovation and gains in energy efficiency.
In any case, I’m always skeptical of “we can’t do X without doing Y” arguments because they’re usually about making the perfect the enemy of the good rather than X actually being precluded by not having Y.
You can't heat your home with public policy
As an employee at a climate tech company, I think the primary roadblock is simply investing resources (money and time) in the various solutions available to us. A ton of innovation is happening along the way (e.g. first ever net positive fusion ignition yesterday) but even without much innovation, we could solve the problems by directing our resources at them.
In other words, I think climate change is very solvable and that innovation along the way is constant and inevitable. I'm not saying that we will definitely make the necessary investments to succeed, which I think might be your point? But as this post demonstrates, the rate of investment is improving significantly.
Addressing climate change doesn't really require startups and venture capitalist pump and dump schemes. It requires social and behavioral changes, mainly centered around consumption. Basically everything on this list would increase consumption, manufacturing, construction, road building, etc.
There are many, many known solutions to climate change that do not require any new science or technology. We just don't want to do them. Lists like these are really just trying to invent new tech and science that allows us to keep current levels of consumption.
So far it seems these changes are going to be impossible to achieve. Like you say we just don't want to do them. Current levels of consumption will continue, and increase.
So given that as a prior what are how do you approach the problem? If we can't change human behaviour can we innovate our way out of the problem?
> If we can't change human behaviour can we innovate our way out of the problem?
Most human innovations have increased climate change. I have little optimism that we can suddenly adjust the dial. And capitalism is simply at odds with reducing or even moderating consumption.
> In a positive note, the author is very clear that market fundamentalism - letting capitalism run amok - is emphatically NOT an answer to the environmental crises, and that we need a strong state to regulate and control the private interests, repair market failures and price the externalities. ... That said, I've already noticed that many proponents of this book haven't noticed these caveats, and instead claim that McAfee suggests unbridled capitalism is "the" answer.
And to be clear, I am not opposed to environmentalism and acting on climate change. In fact it's quite the opposite. I do what I can with composting, recycling, native plant restoration and conservation on my property, and my donations. However, I am indeed quite cynical when VCs suddenly want to ride the green wave, and I don't see much of a coherent plan in the post here aside from a shotgun approach to simply making money through investments of a "hot" area.
Current projects suggest it will peak/plateau around 10 billion.
In many developed capitalist economies carbon footprint per person is decreasing.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
Theoretically, if we can drive the carbon footprint per captia down far enough such that the carbon footprint of 10 billion people is lower than the rate of carbon removal (natural and artifical), then we're fine.
Definitely a hard problem, but so is restructuring society into a non-capitalist, non-consumption based system.
So I think the "coherent plan" is to accelerate this decrease in carbon per captia. It's trending the right way but too slowly. But perhaps with the power of the market's exponential growth, if we incentivize it the right way, it will accelerate this in a way to avoid total collapse.
It's sad to see such comments systematically downvoted on HN. I understand most people on here (including me) are paid to believe otherwise but you should really look at the history of tech and energy for the past 200 years or so, and also listen to competent people (i.e. not Musk nor PG) about the energy and geological resources challenges we're facing. Even if you don't care about climate change at all.
Ductwork for cables?
The problem unsolved in practice is post-wiring. A neat device would be a robotic remote controlled drill that can work itself through brick walls vertically from floor to floor (including steel-reinforced concrete ceilings) and in curves if needed.
Hugely expensive toy, but creating no dirt, compared to classic methods of adding more wires.