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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

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.
  - mariushn 7y ago
    Thanks! Sidenote, feedback on https://solcast.com/rooftop-solar/free-pv-system-performance-estimation-tool/ https://solcast.com/rooftop-solar/free-pv-system-performance... from a non-specialist: I know the tool targets existing solar users, but as a potential user, it would help me answer the question "Should I get a 5kw solar panel?". For the same input on the left, I'd like to see historic monthly data for the past 3 years, telling me how much energy my potential panels would generate per year. Also, would be useful to include some info on how much of that energy would actually used when passing through batteries and all the system. If some panels 100kwh in a month, that doesn't mean I can simply subtract 100kwh from my energy bill, but how much could I subtract?
    - layoric 7y ago
      Ha, good eye for what I work on! Appreciate the feedback and likely we'll have more tooling is this space coming out over the next 12-24 months, and the data for others to build these tools sooner than that. We need to get the data correct and easily accessible first and then the hope is we won't be the only ones building the tools on top and others like yourself can see gaps in what is useful and map that to data we have. Specifically regarding "historic monthly data for the past 3 years..", you can tackle it multiple ways, but likely the most scalable for us is monthly averages of a "typical" year for a specific location rather than last X years we can look back on 10+ years to get a better idea "typical" and synthesize it down to monthly. Combining cost comparison, batteries and individual energy consumption is another level of complexity again and not something that can give accurate answers to without knowing highly specific details. How much you could subtract you could take a guess at by looking at your electricity bills and having a guess that >50% of your consumption is probably during the day when the sun is out, but again a couple of heavy usage days when it is cloudy will throw off your averages. There are lots of websites about the economics of getting solar/battery, so while where I work will produce good data to help with those calculations, it will always be individual behavior that determines about worth while the purchase is. As a rule of thumb (in Australia), it is around a 7 year payback at the moment, and batteries will not save you money at this stage.
- Fordec 7y ago
  I'm working on environmental software at the moment, the best unanswered service? A good data API for climate emergencies and disasters classification/push notifications. We can pull in rain data, satellite imagery etc. but correlating it with problems that have a lagging effect (eg. rain today means flooding next week) is a problem I find isn't super scalable from an entry level at the moment. Disaster response is mostly an even by event analysis today. It's not a hard problem, it's just tedious.
  - layoric 7y ago
    That is a great area to work in! I use to work in a government agency in on a very similar area (bush fire hot spot tracking), so your efforts are appreciated! Tedious is one way to put it, but I agree the tech side of push notifications, servers, APIs etc isn't hard but as you've alluded to, disaster detection/classification is tricky and if you are interested in the space, government jobs tend to be the most stable as commercially it doesn't have an obvious "market" consumers are willing to pay for. Similar to utility scale sector in energy, you'll have a hard time as a small team convincing government and commercial weather operators that your detection or forecasting of events from satellite imagery etc are more accurate, so my advice would be to do this with your eyes open and produce as much data validation evidence as you can to share widely so others can validate it. Working with live satellite imagery has a lot of challenges, and pulling clean data out of them consistently. Each satellite is different and has its own biases, operational issues that can be tricky but working on these problems I think is a really useful skill so not time wasted IMO. Best of luck!
ryanmercer 7y ago
>and I think it has a bright future. That's highly debatable. While you might sell software/solar panels/magicwidgets to a small subset of people, for the most part no technology is going to have a meaningful impact on current greenhouse gas emissions. As I said to Wren (I really tear into them in this post, I feel I was fair though)[1] after they post their introduction thread here: > We're going to make changes by convincing people they really don't need to take their 4th international vacation in as many years, nor do they need their 3rd iPhone in 5 years, that their year and a half old MacBook is perfectly fine. They don't need the newest model just because it now has ultra holographic flurm instead of super holographic flurm because all they do is watch YouTube and write emails with the damn thing. Sure you might sell a regional power provider on using some software that does something a little better to improve efficiency 1/2 % which will absolutely make a difference but while you're doing that, a few new coal plants went online in India/China/a developing country. Also the power company that you sold it to is losing obscene amounts of electricity, generated by fossil fuels, via transmission loss So you develop something for ICE cars that cuts out cylinders when lower demand is required, turns off the engine at stops, uses a solar panel to recharge a battery specifically for defrosting the windows instead of relying on the ICE charged lead-acid battery, etc but while you are designing that for a specific line of cars over the course of 2 years China alone added tens of millions of new drivers to the road driving ICE vehicles that aren't burning fuel optimally. While you are writing software, or developing a widget, to shave a few grams of CO2 emissions off of each customer a day websites/apps like YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram are generating tens to hundreds of grams of CO2 per gigabyte of data transferred. While you're trying to reduce the footprint of people with 6-figure salaries that can afford to spend money on reducing their footprint, you have hundreds of millions to billions of up and lower middle-class consumers consuming more and more as their greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at staggering rates. While you're developing software to plan the best optimized routes for a UPS driver or commercial flight, you have people watching vidieos on YT trying to figure out where they want to take their 4th exotic vacation to (by plane, at a couple of tons of CO2 roundtrip per passenger) where they'll eat out the entirety of the time probably generating a bunch of petrochemical derived single-use packaging. You even have Y Combinator doing contradictory stuff in this field, as I said in an open letter to them [2] >Another example of something that wholly puzzles me is, YC has recently asked for solutions to global warming, chiefly carbon sequestration solutions. We're going to produce close to 40 gigatons of carbon this year that will enter the system, that's insanity. If you filled the 10 most massive bodies of freshwater in the world with Azolla (see the Azolla event) you'd only pull roughly 10% of that amount out of the atmosphere annually, and you would only sequester a fraction of that. Yet YC, for the interviews for companies that get an invite, they want the founders to fly to the Bay Area for a 10-minute interview. FOLKS! One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person. People can make immediate and real impacts on their greenhouse gas emissions by cutting 1 day of meat consumption out a week. Then 2 days. Then get meat down to being a special occasion, or never, consumption. People can make immediate and real impacts by opting to watch a documentary instead of flying to Antarctica to take pictures with penguins. People can make immediate and real impacts by reading a book from a library instead of having Netflix streaming in the background why they play Candy Crush or Angry Birds on their phone with the air conditioning blasting 70F air at them while they're wrapped up in a blanket with a hoodie on when it's 75F out. Even if someone cracks cold fusion TODAY, replacing the tens of thousands of power plants around the world... the concrete alone required would release a mind boggling amount of CO2 to produce and replacing them would take decades. Developing software or a widget to optimize one's impact is just selling people hopium. Getting people to radically change their habits (stop travelling, stop ordering from Amazon five times a week for one item each time, stop ordering Uber eats and cook something, reduce meat consumption, shop with a minimal waste mindset, don't buy food if you're going to throw half of it out, make tv a treat not a daily necessity etc). Sure, there is investor money to be pilfered in this field but ehhhh. [1] https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2019/7/18/wren-medieval-indulgence-and-your-carbon-footprint https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2019/7/18/wren-medi... [2] https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2018/10/30/an-open-letter-to-yc https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2018/10/30/an-open-...
jointpdf 7y ago
I’m a data scientist (with a background in environmental economics) working in US gov. contracting, and my goal is make the switch to climate tech or similar. Where would you recommend looking to get started (conferences, communities, companies, specialized job aggregation sites, etc?)

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.
- mariushn 7y ago
  Thanks! Sidenote, feedback on https://solcast.com/rooftop-solar/free-pv-system-performance-estimation-tool/ https://solcast.com/rooftop-solar/free-pv-system-performance... from a non-specialist: I know the tool targets existing solar users, but as a potential user, it would help me answer the question "Should I get a 5kw solar panel?". For the same input on the left, I'd like to see historic monthly data for the past 3 years, telling me how much energy my potential panels would generate per year. Also, would be useful to include some info on how much of that energy would actually used when passing through batteries and all the system. If some panels 100kwh in a month, that doesn't mean I can simply subtract 100kwh from my energy bill, but how much could I subtract?
  - layoric 7y ago
    Ha, good eye for what I work on! Appreciate the feedback and likely we'll have more tooling is this space coming out over the next 12-24 months, and the data for others to build these tools sooner than that. We need to get the data correct and easily accessible first and then the hope is we won't be the only ones building the tools on top and others like yourself can see gaps in what is useful and map that to data we have. Specifically regarding "historic monthly data for the past 3 years..", you can tackle it multiple ways, but likely the most scalable for us is monthly averages of a "typical" year for a specific location rather than last X years we can look back on 10+ years to get a better idea "typical" and synthesize it down to monthly. Combining cost comparison, batteries and individual energy consumption is another level of complexity again and not something that can give accurate answers to without knowing highly specific details. How much you could subtract you could take a guess at by looking at your electricity bills and having a guess that >50% of your consumption is probably during the day when the sun is out, but again a couple of heavy usage days when it is cloudy will throw off your averages. There are lots of websites about the economics of getting solar/battery, so while where I work will produce good data to help with those calculations, it will always be individual behavior that determines about worth while the purchase is. As a rule of thumb (in Australia), it is around a 7 year payback at the moment, and batteries will not save you money at this stage.
Fordec 7y ago
I'm working on environmental software at the moment, the best unanswered service? A good data API for climate emergencies and disasters classification/push notifications. We can pull in rain data, satellite imagery etc. but correlating it with problems that have a lagging effect (eg. rain today means flooding next week) is a problem I find isn't super scalable from an entry level at the moment. Disaster response is mostly an even by event analysis today. It's not a hard problem, it's just tedious.
- layoric 7y ago
  That is a great area to work in! I use to work in a government agency in on a very similar area (bush fire hot spot tracking), so your efforts are appreciated! Tedious is one way to put it, but I agree the tech side of push notifications, servers, APIs etc isn't hard but as you've alluded to, disaster detection/classification is tricky and if you are interested in the space, government jobs tend to be the most stable as commercially it doesn't have an obvious "market" consumers are willing to pay for. Similar to utility scale sector in energy, you'll have a hard time as a small team convincing government and commercial weather operators that your detection or forecasting of events from satellite imagery etc are more accurate, so my advice would be to do this with your eyes open and produce as much data validation evidence as you can to share widely so others can validate it. Working with live satellite imagery has a lot of challenges, and pulling clean data out of them consistently. Each satellite is different and has its own biases, operational issues that can be tricky but working on these problems I think is a really useful skill so not time wasted IMO. Best of luck!

ryanmercer 7y ago

>and I think it has a bright future. That's highly debatable. While you might sell software/solar panels/magicwidgets to a small subset of people, for the most part no technology is going to have a meaningful impact on current greenhouse gas emissions. As I said to Wren (I really tear into them in this post, I feel I was fair though)[1] after they post their introduction thread here: > We're going to make changes by convincing people they really don't need to take their 4th international vacation in as many years, nor do they need their 3rd iPhone in 5 years, that their year and a half old MacBook is perfectly fine. They don't need the newest model just because it now has ultra holographic flurm instead of super holographic flurm because all they do is watch YouTube and write emails with the damn thing. Sure you might sell a regional power provider on using some software that does something a little better to improve efficiency 1/2 % which will absolutely make a difference but while you're doing that, a few new coal plants went online in India/China/a developing country. Also the power company that you sold it to is losing obscene amounts of electricity, generated by fossil fuels, via transmission loss So you develop something for ICE cars that cuts out cylinders when lower demand is required, turns off the engine at stops, uses a solar panel to recharge a battery specifically for defrosting the windows instead of relying on the ICE charged lead-acid battery, etc but while you are designing that for a specific line of cars over the course of 2 years China alone added tens of millions of new drivers to the road driving ICE vehicles that aren't burning fuel optimally. While you are writing software, or developing a widget, to shave a few grams of CO2 emissions off of each customer a day websites/apps like YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram are generating tens to hundreds of grams of CO2 per gigabyte of data transferred. While you're trying to reduce the footprint of people with 6-figure salaries that can afford to spend money on reducing their footprint, you have hundreds of millions to billions of up and lower middle-class consumers consuming more and more as their greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at staggering rates. While you're developing software to plan the best optimized routes for a UPS driver or commercial flight, you have people watching vidieos on YT trying to figure out where they want to take their 4th exotic vacation to (by plane, at a couple of tons of CO2 roundtrip per passenger) where they'll eat out the entirety of the time probably generating a bunch of petrochemical derived single-use packaging. You even have Y Combinator doing contradictory stuff in this field, as I said in an open letter to them [2] >Another example of something that wholly puzzles me is, YC has recently asked for solutions to global warming, chiefly carbon sequestration solutions. We're going to produce close to 40 gigatons of carbon this year that will enter the system, that's insanity. If you filled the 10 most massive bodies of freshwater in the world with Azolla (see the Azolla event) you'd only pull roughly 10% of that amount out of the atmosphere annually, and you would only sequester a fraction of that. Yet YC, for the interviews for companies that get an invite, they want the founders to fly to the Bay Area for a 10-minute interview. FOLKS! One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person. People can make immediate and real impacts on their greenhouse gas emissions by cutting 1 day of meat consumption out a week. Then 2 days. Then get meat down to being a special occasion, or never, consumption. People can make immediate and real impacts by opting to watch a documentary instead of flying to Antarctica to take pictures with penguins. People can make immediate and real impacts by reading a book from a library instead of having Netflix streaming in the background why they play Candy Crush or Angry Birds on their phone with the air conditioning blasting 70F air at them while they're wrapped up in a blanket with a hoodie on when it's 75F out. Even if someone cracks cold fusion TODAY, replacing the tens of thousands of power plants around the world... the concrete alone required would release a mind boggling amount of CO2 to produce and replacing them would take decades. Developing software or a widget to optimize one's impact is just selling people hopium. Getting people to radically change their habits (stop travelling, stop ordering from Amazon five times a week for one item each time, stop ordering Uber eats and cook something, reduce meat consumption, shop with a minimal waste mindset, don't buy food if you're going to throw half of it out, make tv a treat not a daily necessity etc). Sure, there is investor money to be pilfered in this field but ehhhh. [1] https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2019/7/18/wren-medieval-indulgence-and-your-carbon-footprint https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2019/7/18/wren-medi... [2] https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2018/10/30/an-open-letter-to-yc https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2018/10/30/an-open-...

jointpdf 7y ago

I’m a data scientist (with a background in environmental economics) working in US gov. contracting, and my goal is make the switch to climate tech or similar. Where would you recommend looking to get started (conferences, communities, companies, specialized job aggregation sites, etc?)