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Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech

342 points by luu 7y ago

witten 7y ago
A bunch of this resonates with me, having spent many years in climate tech as well. I laughed at the part about selling a pilot to a utility in three months though. That's like super lightning speed in this industry.
teslabox 7y ago
Good analysis of the entrepreneurship in the energy sector. I might email him about this contradiction: 1. Consumers don’t care about energy versus: I don’t believe that we’ll get where we need to go without a global price on carbon. This is why I volunteer with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby to build political will for a national carbon fee and dividend policy in the US Someone pointed out to me around 15 years ago that "green" is terrible branding for environmentalism. Taxing carbon makes living more expensive for people. Most people on the margin will reject anything that makes energy more expensive for them. Dyslexic philosopher George W. Bush once said, "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again." People don't trust scientists, they trust engineers, because engineers own up to their mistakes and usually make a second-generation product that's better than the first edition, whereas 'science advances one funeral at a time' (the standard paraphrase of Max Planck). The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life. Advocating for carbon taxes is an exercise in futility, encouraged by artificial fear. IMHO, climate alarmism is propagated by people with good intentions and incomplete analysis of reconstructed data. Scientists have only recently put temperature sensors on the Juan de Fuca volcanic ridge, there's no sensors on the vast majority of the ocean ridges, and only in the last... ~40 years have they started to put fleets of automated temperature buoys into the oceans... We've had a mild winter where I live, but Baghdad Iraq had atypical snowfall this month [0]. [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/11/baghdad-iraq-snow-winter-storm/4722838002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/11/baghdad... But I feel more and more that we’re approaching the point at which technology has gone about as far as it can within the confines of a 20th century policy regime. The 20th century brought us the electric utility model, which encouraged the economy to develop to use as much energy as possible. Humanity's best hope is not figuring out how to de-carbonize the economy, but to finish the Book of Physics and figure out where all the energy is hiding. Nikola Tesla promised us it's out there. 21st Century physics is tiptoeing towards an answer.
- altacc 7y ago
  I'd disagree that there is a contradiction between consumers caring about energy, and the author's view that a carbon price is a key tool for carbon reduction. They are two very different things. One is end consumers and their monthly bills and the other is business level market economics. There was a lot of buzz about smart meters for electricity, with some very optimistic thinking that once people saw their daily usage they would reduce that usage. That didn't work, and we agree at least here that most people don't think about the cost of plugging in a phone to charge or doing some cooking, these are essentials for their life and they'll do them anyway. On an industry level, with trading of carbon credits and guarantees of origin we're seeing significant financial and brand benefits for companies in carbon reduction and policies do have significant effects. We're seeing another market force affecting company's climate policies, which might end up being more than government policies and carbon trading, which the author hasn't mentioned. Hedge funds, banks and investors are favouring companies with ecological policies, or ceasing to find those with high negative ecological impacts. These are all very real impacts, being made now, are the speed of implementation looks to be increasing. All based on a massive scientific consensus that anecdotes and minor objections do not outweigh. "figuring out where all the energy is hiding" can happen in parallel, and indeed is, but so far there's are no real world solutions that will deliver the energy we need or reduce our ecological impact in the short & medium terms.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    > we agree at least here that most people don't think about the cost of plugging in a phone to charge We agree because it’s smaller than they should care about. Even at 50% socket to battery efficiency and $0.20/kWh electricity, completely charging a 10-15Wh battery costs under a penny. I won’t bend over to pick up a clean but wet penny off the sidewalk, let alone go without a charged phone to save a penny.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  > The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life. This. The abject failure of airlines' "pay an extra $XX on your ticket to offset the carbon emissions of your flight" showed that the vast majority of people are virtue-signalling about climate change but not prepared to make any actual changes to their lifestyle for it. I've had arguments with "green" friends about their use of cars (I haven't owned a car for >10 years - I prefer walking/cycling). They care desperately about the planet, but they care more about not losing the convenience of their personal car. I notice the emphasis has shifted recently onto regulation of polluting industries, such as oil companies. I think this is in part because of the complete failure to change people's lifestyles. It's easier to regulate 100 large companies than get 1 billion people to accept responsibility for their lifestyle. But it'll be interesting to see what happens when those companies pass the cost of that regulation onto their customers.
perfunctory 7y ago
> As far as bending the warming curve towards 1.5° C is concerned, I think policy and regulatory reform is currently a larger source of leverage than technology. Refreshing to hear this from someone working in climate tech.
- lorenzhs 7y ago
  Absolutely. And before anyone claims that any such action would inevitably favour the well-off at the expense of the poor, let me point out that schemes like carbon fee and dividend exist that implement a carbon tax in a non-regressive way by returning the collected tax revenue to the population in form of a dividend paid equally to everyone. That way, people with carbon-intensive lifestyles (eg, lots of air travel), who tend to be well-off, pay more, and people who can't afford overseas vacations every year will more likely than not pay less carbon tax than the dividend they receive. This incentivises low individual carbon emissions without disproportionately affecting less well-off people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    If you think that pricing carbon externalities into all goods now and offering a dividend later (yearly? Quarterly? Monthly?) will not be regressive, ask anyone living paycheck to paycheck how they feel about it. It might balance out in the big scheme of things, but it isn't going to be doing any favors to people who are already precariously balanced and lack the savings to make personal adjustments. You can be sure there will be mass protests if the price of gas, food, and electricity double (esp food in northern climates where transportation and refrigeration add a lot to produce and frozen goods as well as meats).
    - WhompingWindows 7y ago
      There won't be mass protests, there will be vocal minority protests like we saw in France. For better or worse, vocal minorities can do a lot of damage to the policies we need.
    - 7y ago
layoric 7y ago
This is a great piece and resonates with me a lot. I was an early employee at a climate tech startup ~3 years ago. I moved into climate tech intentionally from local gov contracting, it’s a great field for someone like a Data Engineer or Data Science kind of role, lots of opportunity to work on many different things. I agree with the post that the utility scale space is a hard slog but I honestly believe the only way to scale renewables is to make it economically attractive for investment and any tech that can reduce operational cost of these assets to increase margins and attract more investment into utility scale renewable generation. A carbon price would be a huge boost to this space, things are still progressing without it but I think it would seriously accelerate our energy transition as well as spur innovation for non energy related carbon intensive industries. The current state of low interest rates world wide and funds having a harder time finding good returns means a lot of groups building solar utility scale assets are banks/funds with little knowledge/interest in energy generation, pulling together those with the how to knowledge to materialize their return on investment. I highly recommend working in this space, its technically challenging and I think it has a bright future. It’s not as big and flashy as a lot of software startup worlds but small teams can still have a big impact. I also sure prefer working on these problems than working on platforms trying to sell more ads.
- mariushn 7y ago
  > lots of opportunity to work on many different things. What could you use help with? If a software engineer could invest 2 weeks in producing something useful for your company (including adding a feature to an existing open source project), what would be a list of potential quick projects?
  - layoric 7y ago
    Not a list but data analysis tooling is probably a large category of things that need work on. A lot of our customers are deep knowledge experts but not highly computer literate, a lot are good enough with Excel but still struggle with UTC conversion. Large amounts of effort goes into validating the quality of our data by our customers and we look for ways to help but it is a large domain to itself while we are still focusing on making our data better and more accessible. We’re slowly building trust by giving data freely to researchers but validation of our data, handling formats, date time conversions, carefully equating temporally and spatially, etc is still largely manual and significant barrier of entry for some. I’ll keep in mind to build a specific list at some point.
Beltiras 7y ago
Three most important things for 1.5C are: 1. Stop burning coal 2. Get shipping off oil and onto renewables 3. DAC efforts need to be stepped up, both biological and technological All of those are achieved by turning to Gen 4 nuclear reactors. MSRs are now entering trial phases [1] where nuclear energy generation is not as strictly regulated as in the States. Miniaturization efforts have found solutions where such a power plant [2] could be cost effective for shipping. DAC efforts are a bit strange. I've looked a bit into tree planting and haven't found anything that looks like it scales with investment. I can't purchase a product knowing it will result in extra efforts, or put another way, if a billionaire would pour in a billion dollars, it wouldn't scale up the operation proportionately to the increased funds. Technological DAC is a solved problem that would scale but needs a power source. 4th gen reactors are the only thing that tackles these points on all fronts. [1] http://thorconpower.com/project/ http://thorconpower.com/project/ [2] https://www.seaborg.co/ https://www.seaborg.co/
- L_Rahman 7y ago
  Would not be a hacker news climate thread without someone jumping in immediately with nuclear. I am not opposed to the technology in a meaningful way but the problem is that the conditions in which nuclear can thrive - regulatory scheme, public perception of climate change risk, long time horizon infrastructure development, $$$ - non nuclear renewables easily outcompete. I wonder how the nuclear folks think about this. The tech doesn’t exist in a numerical vacuum of efficiency and dollars per watt. It lived inside a complex ecosystem within which it doesn’t really seem competitive.
  - Beltiras 7y ago
    If Greenpeace only knew the damage they did back in the 80's and 90's... Granted that nuclear power back then was primitive and dangerous. You are absolutely right. Most of the innovative projects are putting up shop in less developed countries exactly for this reason. Once proven there the regulatory hindrances in the west will disappear because for industrial purposes nothing else will be able to compete. MSRs can produce thermals in excess of 2000C which is enough for most smelting operations. This will increase efficiency almost twofold. This will mean all smelting operations will move to areas where the technology can be employed. Because of the economic incentives there will be countries with emerging economies (and already are, see Indonesia) that will take advantage. This will take a decade or two to percolate but the writing is on the wall. Failing to react to it will only make dinos out of the countries unwilling to change.
allovernow 7y ago
If the 2019-ncov spreads to India we might have a little more leeway in meeting targets. China's air right now is the cleanest it's been in decades. You can see for yourself on those online pollution maps.
- triom3 7y ago
  Wow, just wow. I knew some people here are climate extremists but this is just sickening. If you hate climate change so much why not talk about the biggest producer of CO2 on the planet? Or is this another case of American exceptionalism?
jansan 7y ago
What has climate tech achieved so far? Would the world be worse off if there were no climate tech companies?
- trengorilla 7y ago
  Both of these questions are irrelevant.
- maliker 7y ago
  Climate tech has driven solar and wind generation from the most expensive generation assets to the cheapest over the last 20 years. Energy storage has gone from a product for cordless consumer devices to something that's cheap enough to replace fossil fuel peaking and reliability units. Nest built an energy efficiency product that's a household name. So, yes, the world would be way worse off.
  - jillesvangurp 7y ago
    Exactly, we owe a lot to those pioneers that started innovating half a century ago. About five years ago is when non subsidized renewables caught up with just about everything else in terms of unsubsidized cost/kwh. By now, coal plants are going bankrupt and people have all but stopped building new ones. Gas plants are not far behind. I'd say another five years of price drops will push that over the point where that becomes equally uneconomic. Most plants under construction right now are extremely likely to be retired long before their projected end of lives. To preempt the inevitable "but ... we need unspecified amounts of reserve capacity for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't come out" croqs. This is a real problem that is easily addressed with 1) batteries, cables, and excess capacity (name your safety factor; 10x is feasible and probably still cheaper if needed). Batteries give you local energy buffers. We've used cables to move power around since electricity became commercially available. Multiple interconnected production sites distributed across every country (as well as off shore) can absorb any amount of clouds, or other weather phenomena that might temporarily cause a continent lack of wind & sun. And of course there's no rule that says we can only cover 100$ of our energy needs. A few extra panels, wind mills, etc. can push this to 200, 300, or more percent. Also the excess is actually useful for doing stuff like generating synthesized fuels, desalinating water (or condensing it from thin air), etc. My main argument here is that clean energy is about to create an economic boom that is similar in size to what happened when we discovered fire, coal, and oil (in that order). Historically every time we reduce the cost of energy, we've had a massive economic boom. IMHO we're on the edge of the next one which will be powered by dirt cheap and plentiful clean energy that we can consume by the twh completely guilt free. The main problem in this space is that people don't see the big picture. Too many tree huggers (no offense) and not enough people with vision.
dd36 7y ago
> Buying EVs and solar panels make us feel good, but only represents marginal progress while oil subsidies artificially prop up the internal combustion engine and campaign finance laws give incumbent fossil fuel companies undue influence to hamstring the deployment of clean technologies. Yaaaaass!
- mariushn 7y ago
  What exactly could individuals do to stop fossil fuel subsidies? Petitions or writing to politicians doesn't work. FYI https://www.iisd.org/gsi/ https://www.iisd.org/gsi/ https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=e1210 https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=e1210
  - zulgan 7y ago
    rebel.
    - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
      Civil wars cost a lot of fossil fuels to wage. At least wait for the cybertruck to come out ;)
      - perfunctory 7y ago
        rebellion != civil war
        hutzlibu 7y ago
        In theory.
        SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        Given that the yellow vests started rioting over a pretty modest increase in fuel taxes, I don't think popular support for dealing with climate change has nearly the level of popular support our respective circles of friends would have us believe. My own sense is that the typical world leader would love to save their beachfront properties, but lacks the skills to sell the necessary sacrifices when competing with aspiring democratic leaders. Environmentalism needs a populist of its own. Ms. Thunberg did her best, but this really calls for a Lincoln more than a D'ark.
egberts 7y ago
We still have to deal with the media who are touting “Chicken Little” of all kinds since 1912. Media does make it harder to legitimized Climate Studies. And not factoring in urban heat on those 7,200 US temperature-reading stations that existed since 1973 remains problematic toward Data Science. It’s the kind of stuff that makes sketchy scientism look real over reprovable and recreatable fact-based science. I, for one, welcome the Sweet Meteor of Death. /snark
thepangolino 7y ago
Point 6. Policy is more important than technology Should have been on top, front and center of the article.
- fakeNewsIsHere 7y ago
  I'm starting to think the United States needs a 10%er/intellectual/managerial/rational collition. I'm intentionally leaving that open ended because there are smart people that work for non profits and science. This demographic is noticeably different than the supporters of the 2 leading populist demagogues. We understand climate change is happening, we see the empty promises of demagogues, we had our taxes raised under Trump, and our health insurance costs go up under Obama. It's unfortunate that class warfare is developing, but I think the 10%ers are late to the party.
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    I wouldn't say that. It looks more like the 10%ers had simply been winning since at least the 90s and are slow to abandon a strategy that had been successful for so long. Yang was a candidate that could appeal to both the populare and the 10%, but I think he suffered from some anti-STEM bias.
- maliker 7y ago
  I work in climate tech, and it's funny to hear the US democrat candidates for president talking about investing huge amounts in energy research. I think, well yes we could grow our research efforts, but taxing carbon emissions and changing the tax advantages for fossil fuel extraction would be a lot easier than trying to wring another 1% efficiency out of air source heat pumps or doing more grid integration studies...
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Energy research is changing the whole landscape of renewables. Any progress there can easily tip the balance in favor. Some luddite tax on old technology is missing the point/the opportunity we have at this juncture, to make batteries/renewables the obvious/cheap choice for energy in the future.
rfeather 7y ago
I work in a company in the climate tech space, and this all rings very true. Our customer is utilities and I have stayed from fairly early stage through acquisition. It's frustratingly slow moving at times, but we've also been able to have a meaningful impact. Each person in the company can honestly say that they've contributed to emissions reductions to the point that really nothing they do could ever make them carbon positive again. Most of this is due to the scalability of software. It's also been really interesting to see how regulations play into this. Getting utilities to value reducing their topline revenue through user energy efficiency requires regulation, and our customer base mostly reflects which utilities are under such regulations, though we also have a customer experience play for when that's not a primary driver. Like layoric, I would also recommend working in this space for similar reasons. I would also add my experience is that the people are great. It's not get rich quick, so the people here are driven mostly by mission and interesting problems, which leads to a generally high level of positivity.
- layoric 7y ago
  > I would also add my experience is that the people are great. It's not get rich quick, so the people here are driven mostly by mission and interesting problems, which leads to a generally high level of positivity. This is a great point and I've found this as well, even if the mission drive is not there, others are just glad to be working on something that isn't one way or another selling ads and grounded in the real world (sun/wind/energy) so makes for a great group of people.
rb808 7y ago
> Consumers don't care about energy Smart metering should be compulsory in all households with a display showing the current spot price. I should be able to see that right now electricity is expensive or cheap to decide if I should wash my clothes or run the AC. Its crazy the electrical utility industry ties itself in knots to guarantee supply and meet demand peaks when consumers blindly use electricity when they feel like it. Changing demand behaviour should be a priority if we want wind and solar to become more widely used.
- JoshTko 7y ago
  I think customers do care but there is a lot of friction in the process to change. Took me several hours to switch energy sources, should be a toggle option on an app.
- yachtman 7y ago
  > Consumers don't care about energy. Therefore lets make it illegal not to care?? You need to think more pragmatically.
  - rezic 7y ago
    I think the point was more along the lines of making it easier to care.
    - 0x4477 7y ago
      Incentives make it easier to care as there is a payoff of some form for doing so. Compulsion eliminates choice and has an attached penalty for not complying. It doesn't make it easier to care, it eliminates the choice entirely. They're nothing alike.
      - rezic 7y ago
        A bit late to respond to this one, but the post stated that smart metering should be compulsory. Whether you choose to pay any attention to it or not is entirely up to you.
mattygh 7y ago
I have been in this industry for about the same amount of time, and I absolutely could not have said it better. People entering the space can either try to learn from this article or learn these lessons themselves over 2-3 years, I hope they can do the former to avoid spinning their wheels.
rlewkov 7y ago
Having worked for a company that built and sold software to utility companies, #s 1 and 5 resonate with me. Consumers don’t care about energy and it's brutal selling to utilities.
jaakl 7y ago
Brutal truth is that not only consumers/customers, but also the climate does not care about saving on energy use. Consuming of energy is not a problem, only producing it is. Wasting energy does not generate any greenhouse gases or pollution. We just need to produce 100% clean electric energy from certain renewables or nuclear, and it should be so cheap and competitive that all the industries (including e.g. cement producing) would just move over to it.

342 points by luu 7y ago

A bunch of this resonates with me, having spent many years in climate tech as well. I laughed at the part about selling a pilot to a utility in three months though. That's like super lightning speed in this industry.

teslabox 7y ago

Good analysis of the entrepreneurship in the energy sector. I might email him about this contradiction: 1. Consumers don’t care about energy versus: I don’t believe that we’ll get where we need to go without a global price on carbon. This is why I volunteer with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby to build political will for a national carbon fee and dividend policy in the US Someone pointed out to me around 15 years ago that "green" is terrible branding for environmentalism. Taxing carbon makes living more expensive for people. Most people on the margin will reject anything that makes energy more expensive for them. Dyslexic philosopher George W. Bush once said, "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again." People don't trust scientists, they trust engineers, because engineers own up to their mistakes and usually make a second-generation product that's better than the first edition, whereas 'science advances one funeral at a time' (the standard paraphrase of Max Planck). The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life. Advocating for carbon taxes is an exercise in futility, encouraged by artificial fear. IMHO, climate alarmism is propagated by people with good intentions and incomplete analysis of reconstructed data. Scientists have only recently put temperature sensors on the Juan de Fuca volcanic ridge, there's no sensors on the vast majority of the ocean ridges, and only in the last... ~40 years have they started to put fleets of automated temperature buoys into the oceans... We've had a mild winter where I live, but Baghdad Iraq had atypical snowfall this month [0]. [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/11/baghdad-iraq-snow-winter-storm/4722838002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/11/baghdad... But I feel more and more that we’re approaching the point at which technology has gone about as far as it can within the confines of a 20th century policy regime. The 20th century brought us the electric utility model, which encouraged the economy to develop to use as much energy as possible. Humanity's best hope is not figuring out how to de-carbonize the economy, but to finish the Book of Physics and figure out where all the energy is hiding. Nikola Tesla promised us it's out there. 21st Century physics is tiptoeing towards an answer.

altacc 7y ago
I'd disagree that there is a contradiction between consumers caring about energy, and the author's view that a carbon price is a key tool for carbon reduction. They are two very different things. One is end consumers and their monthly bills and the other is business level market economics. There was a lot of buzz about smart meters for electricity, with some very optimistic thinking that once people saw their daily usage they would reduce that usage. That didn't work, and we agree at least here that most people don't think about the cost of plugging in a phone to charge or doing some cooking, these are essentials for their life and they'll do them anyway. On an industry level, with trading of carbon credits and guarantees of origin we're seeing significant financial and brand benefits for companies in carbon reduction and policies do have significant effects. We're seeing another market force affecting company's climate policies, which might end up being more than government policies and carbon trading, which the author hasn't mentioned. Hedge funds, banks and investors are favouring companies with ecological policies, or ceasing to find those with high negative ecological impacts. These are all very real impacts, being made now, are the speed of implementation looks to be increasing. All based on a massive scientific consensus that anecdotes and minor objections do not outweigh. "figuring out where all the energy is hiding" can happen in parallel, and indeed is, but so far there's are no real world solutions that will deliver the energy we need or reduce our ecological impact in the short & medium terms.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  > we agree at least here that most people don't think about the cost of plugging in a phone to charge We agree because it’s smaller than they should care about. Even at 50% socket to battery efficiency and $0.20/kWh electricity, completely charging a 10-15Wh battery costs under a penny. I won’t bend over to pick up a clean but wet penny off the sidewalk, let alone go without a charged phone to save a penny.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
> The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life. This. The abject failure of airlines' "pay an extra $XX on your ticket to offset the carbon emissions of your flight" showed that the vast majority of people are virtue-signalling about climate change but not prepared to make any actual changes to their lifestyle for it. I've had arguments with "green" friends about their use of cars (I haven't owned a car for >10 years - I prefer walking/cycling). They care desperately about the planet, but they care more about not losing the convenience of their personal car. I notice the emphasis has shifted recently onto regulation of polluting industries, such as oil companies. I think this is in part because of the complete failure to change people's lifestyles. It's easier to regulate 100 large companies than get 1 billion people to accept responsibility for their lifestyle. But it'll be interesting to see what happens when those companies pass the cost of that regulation onto their customers.

perfunctory 7y ago

> As far as bending the warming curve towards 1.5° C is concerned, I think policy and regulatory reform is currently a larger source of leverage than technology. Refreshing to hear this from someone working in climate tech.

lorenzhs 7y ago
Absolutely. And before anyone claims that any such action would inevitably favour the well-off at the expense of the poor, let me point out that schemes like carbon fee and dividend exist that implement a carbon tax in a non-regressive way by returning the collected tax revenue to the population in form of a dividend paid equally to everyone. That way, people with carbon-intensive lifestyles (eg, lots of air travel), who tend to be well-off, pay more, and people who can't afford overseas vacations every year will more likely than not pay less carbon tax than the dividend they receive. This incentivises low individual carbon emissions without disproportionately affecting less well-off people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend
- zdragnar 7y ago
  If you think that pricing carbon externalities into all goods now and offering a dividend later (yearly? Quarterly? Monthly?) will not be regressive, ask anyone living paycheck to paycheck how they feel about it. It might balance out in the big scheme of things, but it isn't going to be doing any favors to people who are already precariously balanced and lack the savings to make personal adjustments. You can be sure there will be mass protests if the price of gas, food, and electricity double (esp food in northern climates where transportation and refrigeration add a lot to produce and frozen goods as well as meats).
  - WhompingWindows 7y ago
    There won't be mass protests, there will be vocal minority protests like we saw in France. For better or worse, vocal minorities can do a lot of damage to the policies we need.
  - 7y ago

layoric 7y ago

This is a great piece and resonates with me a lot. I was an early employee at a climate tech startup ~3 years ago. I moved into climate tech intentionally from local gov contracting, it’s a great field for someone like a Data Engineer or Data Science kind of role, lots of opportunity to work on many different things. I agree with the post that the utility scale space is a hard slog but I honestly believe the only way to scale renewables is to make it economically attractive for investment and any tech that can reduce operational cost of these assets to increase margins and attract more investment into utility scale renewable generation. A carbon price would be a huge boost to this space, things are still progressing without it but I think it would seriously accelerate our energy transition as well as spur innovation for non energy related carbon intensive industries. The current state of low interest rates world wide and funds having a harder time finding good returns means a lot of groups building solar utility scale assets are banks/funds with little knowledge/interest in energy generation, pulling together those with the how to knowledge to materialize their return on investment. I highly recommend working in this space, its technically challenging and I think it has a bright future. It’s not as big and flashy as a lot of software startup worlds but small teams can still have a big impact. I also sure prefer working on these problems than working on platforms trying to sell more ads.

mariushn 7y ago
> lots of opportunity to work on many different things. What could you use help with? If a software engineer could invest 2 weeks in producing something useful for your company (including adding a feature to an existing open source project), what would be a list of potential quick projects?
- layoric 7y ago
  Not a list but data analysis tooling is probably a large category of things that need work on. A lot of our customers are deep knowledge experts but not highly computer literate, a lot are good enough with Excel but still struggle with UTC conversion. Large amounts of effort goes into validating the quality of our data by our customers and we look for ways to help but it is a large domain to itself while we are still focusing on making our data better and more accessible. We’re slowly building trust by giving data freely to researchers but validation of our data, handling formats, date time conversions, carefully equating temporally and spatially, etc is still largely manual and significant barrier of entry for some. I’ll keep in mind to build a specific list at some point.

Beltiras 7y ago

Three most important things for 1.5C are: 1. Stop burning coal 2. Get shipping off oil and onto renewables 3. DAC efforts need to be stepped up, both biological and technological All of those are achieved by turning to Gen 4 nuclear reactors. MSRs are now entering trial phases [1] where nuclear energy generation is not as strictly regulated as in the States. Miniaturization efforts have found solutions where such a power plant [2] could be cost effective for shipping. DAC efforts are a bit strange. I've looked a bit into tree planting and haven't found anything that looks like it scales with investment. I can't purchase a product knowing it will result in extra efforts, or put another way, if a billionaire would pour in a billion dollars, it wouldn't scale up the operation proportionately to the increased funds. Technological DAC is a solved problem that would scale but needs a power source. 4th gen reactors are the only thing that tackles these points on all fronts. [1] http://thorconpower.com/project/ http://thorconpower.com/project/ [2] https://www.seaborg.co/ https://www.seaborg.co/

L_Rahman 7y ago
Would not be a hacker news climate thread without someone jumping in immediately with nuclear. I am not opposed to the technology in a meaningful way but the problem is that the conditions in which nuclear can thrive - regulatory scheme, public perception of climate change risk, long time horizon infrastructure development, $$$ - non nuclear renewables easily outcompete. I wonder how the nuclear folks think about this. The tech doesn’t exist in a numerical vacuum of efficiency and dollars per watt. It lived inside a complex ecosystem within which it doesn’t really seem competitive.
- Beltiras 7y ago
  If Greenpeace only knew the damage they did back in the 80's and 90's... Granted that nuclear power back then was primitive and dangerous. You are absolutely right. Most of the innovative projects are putting up shop in less developed countries exactly for this reason. Once proven there the regulatory hindrances in the west will disappear because for industrial purposes nothing else will be able to compete. MSRs can produce thermals in excess of 2000C which is enough for most smelting operations. This will increase efficiency almost twofold. This will mean all smelting operations will move to areas where the technology can be employed. Because of the economic incentives there will be countries with emerging economies (and already are, see Indonesia) that will take advantage. This will take a decade or two to percolate but the writing is on the wall. Failing to react to it will only make dinos out of the countries unwilling to change.

allovernow 7y ago

If the 2019-ncov spreads to India we might have a little more leeway in meeting targets. China's air right now is the cleanest it's been in decades. You can see for yourself on those online pollution maps.

triom3 7y ago
Wow, just wow. I knew some people here are climate extremists but this is just sickening. If you hate climate change so much why not talk about the biggest producer of CO2 on the planet? Or is this another case of American exceptionalism?

jansan 7y ago

What has climate tech achieved so far? Would the world be worse off if there were no climate tech companies?

trengorilla 7y ago
Both of these questions are irrelevant.
maliker 7y ago
Climate tech has driven solar and wind generation from the most expensive generation assets to the cheapest over the last 20 years. Energy storage has gone from a product for cordless consumer devices to something that's cheap enough to replace fossil fuel peaking and reliability units. Nest built an energy efficiency product that's a household name. So, yes, the world would be way worse off.
- jillesvangurp 7y ago
  Exactly, we owe a lot to those pioneers that started innovating half a century ago. About five years ago is when non subsidized renewables caught up with just about everything else in terms of unsubsidized cost/kwh. By now, coal plants are going bankrupt and people have all but stopped building new ones. Gas plants are not far behind. I'd say another five years of price drops will push that over the point where that becomes equally uneconomic. Most plants under construction right now are extremely likely to be retired long before their projected end of lives. To preempt the inevitable "but ... we need unspecified amounts of reserve capacity for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't come out" croqs. This is a real problem that is easily addressed with 1) batteries, cables, and excess capacity (name your safety factor; 10x is feasible and probably still cheaper if needed). Batteries give you local energy buffers. We've used cables to move power around since electricity became commercially available. Multiple interconnected production sites distributed across every country (as well as off shore) can absorb any amount of clouds, or other weather phenomena that might temporarily cause a continent lack of wind & sun. And of course there's no rule that says we can only cover 100$ of our energy needs. A few extra panels, wind mills, etc. can push this to 200, 300, or more percent. Also the excess is actually useful for doing stuff like generating synthesized fuels, desalinating water (or condensing it from thin air), etc. My main argument here is that clean energy is about to create an economic boom that is similar in size to what happened when we discovered fire, coal, and oil (in that order). Historically every time we reduce the cost of energy, we've had a massive economic boom. IMHO we're on the edge of the next one which will be powered by dirt cheap and plentiful clean energy that we can consume by the twh completely guilt free. The main problem in this space is that people don't see the big picture. Too many tree huggers (no offense) and not enough people with vision.

dd36 7y ago

> Buying EVs and solar panels make us feel good, but only represents marginal progress while oil subsidies artificially prop up the internal combustion engine and campaign finance laws give incumbent fossil fuel companies undue influence to hamstring the deployment of clean technologies. Yaaaaass!

mariushn 7y ago
What exactly could individuals do to stop fossil fuel subsidies? Petitions or writing to politicians doesn't work. FYI https://www.iisd.org/gsi/ https://www.iisd.org/gsi/ https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=e1210 https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=e1210
- zulgan 7y ago
  rebel.
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    Civil wars cost a lot of fossil fuels to wage. At least wait for the cybertruck to come out ;)
    - perfunctory 7y ago
      rebellion != civil war
      - hutzlibu 7y ago
        In theory.
      - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        Given that the yellow vests started rioting over a pretty modest increase in fuel taxes, I don't think popular support for dealing with climate change has nearly the level of popular support our respective circles of friends would have us believe. My own sense is that the typical world leader would love to save their beachfront properties, but lacks the skills to sell the necessary sacrifices when competing with aspiring democratic leaders. Environmentalism needs a populist of its own. Ms. Thunberg did her best, but this really calls for a Lincoln more than a D'ark.

egberts 7y ago

We still have to deal with the media who are touting “Chicken Little” of all kinds since 1912. Media does make it harder to legitimized Climate Studies. And not factoring in urban heat on those 7,200 US temperature-reading stations that existed since 1973 remains problematic toward Data Science. It’s the kind of stuff that makes sketchy scientism look real over reprovable and recreatable fact-based science. I, for one, welcome the Sweet Meteor of Death. /snark

thepangolino 7y ago

Point 6. Policy is more important than technology Should have been on top, front and center of the article.

fakeNewsIsHere 7y ago
I'm starting to think the United States needs a 10%er/intellectual/managerial/rational collition. I'm intentionally leaving that open ended because there are smart people that work for non profits and science. This demographic is noticeably different than the supporters of the 2 leading populist demagogues. We understand climate change is happening, we see the empty promises of demagogues, we had our taxes raised under Trump, and our health insurance costs go up under Obama. It's unfortunate that class warfare is developing, but I think the 10%ers are late to the party.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  I wouldn't say that. It looks more like the 10%ers had simply been winning since at least the 90s and are slow to abandon a strategy that had been successful for so long. Yang was a candidate that could appeal to both the populare and the 10%, but I think he suffered from some anti-STEM bias.
maliker 7y ago
I work in climate tech, and it's funny to hear the US democrat candidates for president talking about investing huge amounts in energy research. I think, well yes we could grow our research efforts, but taxing carbon emissions and changing the tax advantages for fossil fuel extraction would be a lot easier than trying to wring another 1% efficiency out of air source heat pumps or doing more grid integration studies...
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Energy research is changing the whole landscape of renewables. Any progress there can easily tip the balance in favor. Some luddite tax on old technology is missing the point/the opportunity we have at this juncture, to make batteries/renewables the obvious/cheap choice for energy in the future.

rfeather 7y ago

I work in a company in the climate tech space, and this all rings very true. Our customer is utilities and I have stayed from fairly early stage through acquisition. It's frustratingly slow moving at times, but we've also been able to have a meaningful impact. Each person in the company can honestly say that they've contributed to emissions reductions to the point that really nothing they do could ever make them carbon positive again. Most of this is due to the scalability of software. It's also been really interesting to see how regulations play into this. Getting utilities to value reducing their topline revenue through user energy efficiency requires regulation, and our customer base mostly reflects which utilities are under such regulations, though we also have a customer experience play for when that's not a primary driver. Like layoric, I would also recommend working in this space for similar reasons. I would also add my experience is that the people are great. It's not get rich quick, so the people here are driven mostly by mission and interesting problems, which leads to a generally high level of positivity.

layoric 7y ago
> I would also add my experience is that the people are great. It's not get rich quick, so the people here are driven mostly by mission and interesting problems, which leads to a generally high level of positivity. This is a great point and I've found this as well, even if the mission drive is not there, others are just glad to be working on something that isn't one way or another selling ads and grounded in the real world (sun/wind/energy) so makes for a great group of people.

rb808 7y ago

> Consumers don't care about energy Smart metering should be compulsory in all households with a display showing the current spot price. I should be able to see that right now electricity is expensive or cheap to decide if I should wash my clothes or run the AC. Its crazy the electrical utility industry ties itself in knots to guarantee supply and meet demand peaks when consumers blindly use electricity when they feel like it. Changing demand behaviour should be a priority if we want wind and solar to become more widely used.

JoshTko 7y ago
I think customers do care but there is a lot of friction in the process to change. Took me several hours to switch energy sources, should be a toggle option on an app.
yachtman 7y ago
> Consumers don't care about energy. Therefore lets make it illegal not to care?? You need to think more pragmatically.
- rezic 7y ago
  I think the point was more along the lines of making it easier to care.
  - 0x4477 7y ago
    Incentives make it easier to care as there is a payoff of some form for doing so. Compulsion eliminates choice and has an attached penalty for not complying. It doesn't make it easier to care, it eliminates the choice entirely. They're nothing alike.
    - rezic 7y ago
      A bit late to respond to this one, but the post stated that smart metering should be compulsory. Whether you choose to pay any attention to it or not is entirely up to you.

mattygh 7y ago

I have been in this industry for about the same amount of time, and I absolutely could not have said it better. People entering the space can either try to learn from this article or learn these lessons themselves over 2-3 years, I hope they can do the former to avoid spinning their wheels.

rlewkov 7y ago

Having worked for a company that built and sold software to utility companies, #s 1 and 5 resonate with me. Consumers don’t care about energy and it's brutal selling to utilities.

jaakl 7y ago

Brutal truth is that not only consumers/customers, but also the climate does not care about saving on energy use. Consuming of energy is not a problem, only producing it is. Wasting energy does not generate any greenhouse gases or pollution. We just need to produce 100% clean electric energy from certain renewables or nuclear, and it should be so cheap and competitive that all the industries (including e.g. cement producing) would just move over to it.