5 ms·
Moved to renewables. Wanted to try and help with climate change and needed new challenges. Solar is a fantastic industry. Lots of room for improvement feels l
by jwitchel 5y ago
Moved to renewables. Wanted to try and help with climate change and needed new challenges.
Solar is a fantastic industry. Lots of room for improvement feels like internet did in thr mid 90s. Just a ton of enthusiasm and a sense you're part of something big and important.
- achenet 5y agocould you please describe how you did the switch?
- jwitchel 5y agoI came to terms with the belief that it was important for me to try and help with what I viewed as the critical problem of our time. I just couldn't sit on the sidelines any more. After that leap it was simply aligning my personal skills with various opportunities until I found a good fit. I looked broadly for a while: reforestation, fintech, residential installations, real estate, utility scale, training, open source, enterprise software, venture, etc. And I'm fundamentally an entrepreneur and a capitalist so I looked for problems through that lens. But for me that process began with the same basic question every engineer has almost every day: "What is the problem, and what can I do to help fix it?"
- emteycz 5y agoWhat is your typical day? Did you need any certifications etc?
- MattGaiser 5y agoWhat is it you do in the industry?
- agumonkey 5y agoOne of the few interviews I accepted was for a renewable management company. It does change the motivation a bit.
- pogopaule 5y agoDid the same but as a dev. Created this list for my fellow devs who want to do the same https://github.com/pogopaule/awesome-sustainability-jobs https://github.com/pogopaule/awesome-sustainability-jobs
- marssaxman 5y agoThanks!
- erikpl 5y agoThank you so much for this!
- pogopaule 5y agoYou are very welcome
- PyWoody 5y agoThis is exactly what I've been looking to find. Thank you for putting it together. You should make a standalone post of it.
- pogopaule 5y agook, will do
- hwers 5y agoCould you give a sense about what the interesting problems there are? I get the sense (knowing nothing) that it's maybe similar to ML in the sense that only a few top research labs does all the fun stuff. The internet in the 90s had tons of low hanging fruit just about anyone could pluck.
- jwitchel 5y agoEnergy is fundamentally an economic problem so you're looking for places that reduce the incremental cost to deliver a kWh of renewable energy consistently over a long period of time. There is a shocking amount of soft costs (lawyers, permitting, financing, insurance, monitoring, sales, etc.) in renewables. Software can help with a lot of that. Fintech too. The scale of our global energy infrastructure is incredible so small gains can have outsized impacts. I encourage you to just dig in.
- tinodb 5y agoCan only speak for ourselves, but at Solar Monkey we make software for solar panel installers and consumers. We have plenty of fun challenges! Like figuring out how to make it easy for sales people to design (electrically) valid solar panel set ups, as well as determining whether systems perform well for consumers based on yield data (with both analytical and ML models).
- sabujp 5y agodo you think NEM 3.0 is coming and will it kill the residential solar industry?
- 11235813213455 5y agoThat would help with climate change, but the biggest part is reducing our consumption in all senses. For example, my electricity bill is 10€/month, I have no fridge, use no heating, no hot water, so I'd totally be able to live with just a small solar panel, as I almost never use a device that requires a high power (I eat mostly raw fruits/vegs, more rarely eggs, fish or rice)
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoI mean, kudos to you, but the vast, vast majority of people (myself included) are not willing to give up refrigerators, or heat, or hot water, so your approach really isn't relevant give the scale needed to solve the problem.
- seba_dos1 5y agoI haven't done so myself either, but as the time passes I increasingly become convinced that the only available options for vast majority of population will be to do it now on your own terms or be forced to do it with everyone else later.
- vinyl7 5y agoI like how as a people, we exploded with technology and capabilities, and now supposedly need to return to living like a cave man. I just hope that people who decide to live that way can cope with the fact that all the rich people and politicians will still live in affluence no matter what
- 11235813213455 5y ago"like a cave man" → I advocate for cherry-picking what's really useful in our modern societies: internet, a laptop, runnable water, electricity, and saving energy and resources for all the rest because we're reaching our limits on this planet. But that's hard to pass this message without making people feel "guilty" (which again is not my point at all)
- omginternets 5y agoAre you doing software in that field, or are you an entirely different sort of engineer now? If so, did you have to obtain some kind of certification? Can you tell us about how that works?
- jwitchel 5y agoI stayed in software and specifically fintech software where I spent most of my career. There are aspects of renewables that require certification or licenses depending on your country (electrical work for example). But most of the work does not.