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A lot to unpack here. First, I tend to react badly to the usual SCV "We are going to disrupt <XYZ>" when there's nothing wrong with <XYZ>. The current policy-
by robomartin 4y ago
A lot to unpack here.
First, I tend to react badly to the usual SCV "We are going to disrupt <XYZ>" when there's nothing wrong with <XYZ>.
The current policy-driven push for heat pump systems is, at best, nonsensical.
Why?
Just speaking of the US (and guessing it might be the same in other regions) the power grid and power generation capacity are already stressed to the point where, in places like CA, power outages and having the governor ask electric vehicle owners not to charge their cars are a thing.
Now we want to push 80 million homes to ADD, not remove, electrical demand to the tune of kilowatts per home, in the name of efficiency?
This is deeply misguided. We need to get serious about upgrading our power generation and distribution systems before adding non-trivial demand.
Current estimates are that we need to double our power generation and transmission capacity to be able to support electric cars. Going with an electric heat-pump based system for cooling and heating means having the potential to add somewhere in the range of 3 kW to 6 kW or more of nearly steady-state load for 6 to 12 hours to tens of millions of homes.
While it is never a good idea to apply averages to this kind of analysis, if I were to do the math for the endpoints, we are talking about 240 GW to 480 GW of new power demand for 80 million homes going electric. That is nothing even close to trivial.
For context, a nuclear power plant is typically rated at 1 GW. This means we might need somewhere between 240 and 480 new nuclear power plants to support full electrification of our heating and cooling systems. And we are not even talking about large commercial buildings, hotels, etc.
Add that to the 1200 GW deficit for full electrification of ground transportation and we quickly approach a requirement for over 1500 new 1GW nuclear power plants.
No. You cannot do this with solar. You cannot do this with solar and wind combined. These technologies are not reliable. Under the best of conditions they might be able to reach 80% reliability. Another way to say it is that towns and cities will go dark 20% of the time without having 100% backup systems.
In other words, the energy story on this (not the startup, but rather the idea of placing all of our eggs on the magical electric-power-will-save-the-world basket) isn't good at all.
As far as the startup itself. I know there are first adopters out there who might jump on something like this. I am a first adopter of many technologies. I have spent a thousand dollars on 3D printers that turned out to be crap. Not a big deal. When it comes to my home, no, sorry. Not going to happen.
First of all, your company is a YC funded startup with no manufacturing history or infrastructure whatsoever. Sorry, this isn't like making smart watches. What you are going to do is come-up with a design, go to a company in China and make something. A unicorn. Your design will change based on what that company already makes. It will be, for the most part, not much different internally than what Carrier and other companies make.
The difference is that companies like Carrier have been around forever. They can stand behind their product and I can be assured they --and the extended support infrastructure that knows their product-- will be around for decades. You are one bank failure or investor decision away from being out of business.
Others may think differently, of course. In my case, there is no way I am going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a unicorn that nobody will want to touch of maintain. I saw a post from someone in France who cannot get their heat-pump system serviced. That's a reality in the US if one installs something your local service infrastructure has never seen or isn't interested in dealing with.
Another consideration: Installing a no-name system in a home can have negative consequences when it comes time to sell it.
HEPA, air quality, smart thermostat, API's, cloud, etc. Yeah, no, not interested. As someone else said, a contact closure is all you need and want. No air conditioning maintenance guy is going to show up with a laptop to connect with your A/C unit via SSH.
Air filtering is easy and cheap. Depending on how you want to do it, it can, quite literally, cost less than $100 to have excellent filtering. I recently experimented with building a couple of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsi%E2%80%93Rosenthal_Box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsi%E2%80%93Rosenthal_Box
I used 20 x 30 inch tall filters, which don't cost much more than 20 x 20's. The result was super-cheap high-performance filtration with measurable results and very low power consumption.
I do wish you the best. I am not a potential customer. In fact, I am surprised YC funded you. My guess is they are jumping on top of the billions that will be available in this segment. The investors will do well. I don't see anything in your product and company history to lead me to believe you will be able to produce anything "disruptive" at scale. The Carrier's of this world will get the bulk of that business, and rightly so.
Here's something you could do that would be disruptive. It has nothing to do with heat pumps but could easily be integrated into one:
Rather than build a single large system (say, 5 ton cooling capacity equivalent), create a single high efficiency "box" that effectively houses multiple smaller systems. For sake of a discussion, imagine a system that is five 1 ton units in one box.
Why?
Everyone wants zone controls. If you own a two level home, and you don't have a zone system, you hate your life. Upstairs is always ridiculously hot when heating and downstairs is freezing when cooling.
Come-up with a truly innovative way to create a zone system with room-scale granularity. Make it super easy to install without having to have ugly heat exchangers mounted on the wall. Easy enough that, when done, the home will not look materially different.
Do this and you will --if they trust you-- have lots of customers. Or, more likely than that, one of the large HVAC companies will acquire your company for the technology.
That's the real energy efficiency story. Room-scale granularity in HVAC at a price not materially different from a centralized single-zone system. I want thermostats (or sensors) in every room. There is no need to cool or heat the bathroom all day. There is no need to cool or heat the bedrooms when nobody is in there until the end of the day. A lot of homes would be just fine if one room was actively cooled/heated while the rest of the rooms were "off" and a couple (kitchen and one bathroom) were programmed to be at the JNC threshold (Just Nominally Comfortable --my term).
That, to me, would be innovative and disruptive. Not an easy task. You would have to come up with a way to build such a system in such a way that you did not have to penetrate the home with a million refrigerant hoses (a pair per room?) and work with the standard installation to the extent possible.
There's a lot more to something like this. Just making a heat pump that looks good and has wiz-bang controls, from my perspective, isn't disruptive at all. There are lower cost solutions in the market today that can be financed, people trust, contractors can install and support.
Your opportunity for disruption, in my opinion, is in delivering a material and non-trivial improvement to best-in-class performance of products available today. That, to me, means a granular zone system.
Personal context: I have decades of thermal management and clean-room design and operation experience as well as life-support level experience in aerospace applications. Some of the technology we helped engineer orbits the planet and, in time, will go to the moon.
- cmui 4y agoThanks for your perspective! Regarding the overall energy story, do you think decarbonizing the economy should be a national priority, and if so, what is the proper approach to take?
- robomartin 4y ago> do you think decarbonizing the economy should be a national priority Yes, absolutely. Global, really. > what is the proper approach to take? I am glad you asked this question because my follow-up to the above was going to be: Judiciously. One of my pet peeves when it comes to all things related to the set of subjects orbiting the general idea of cleaning our collective act is that the popular narrative has lost most connections, if not all, with reality. The story has to begin with data. We have lots of it. Here's the source for the last 800K years of atmospheric CO2 concentration: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html This graph, in particular, is very interesting: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical.jpg https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical... If we draw a few lines on it and take rough measurements... https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png we might observe that, historically speaking, a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 took in the range of 25K years and a 100 ppm decrease 50K to 75K years. What is interesting about this data and charts is that it gives us a baseline that is, in my opinion, important to keep in mind if we are to be intellectually honest about this subject: Baseline: If humanity left the planet tomorrow, the rate of change for the natural reduction of CO2 is approximately 100 ppm in 75K years. Let's call that 1 ppm in 1000 years for short (it's just a thinking tool, not a precise calculation). As a "solution", I can't think of anything more extreme than humanity evaporating from this planet tomorrow. And, if we did, it would take somewhere around 100K years for atmospheric CO2 to come down from the current 400 ppm range to, say the historical peak of around 300 ppm. I also think this perspective also informs us about the scale of the problem. Any solution that purports to be able to take the natural rate of change from 1 ppm/ 1000 years to anything in the scale of a human lifetime has to provide proof as extraordinary as the claim being made. For example, a claim of being able to drop atmospheric CO2 concentration by 100 ppm in 30 years would represent a rate of change over 3000x faster than the no-humans-on-earth baseline rate. That is an exceptional claim that requires even more exceptional proof. In understanding certain topics I feel it is important to achieve what I like to refer to as a "tangible sense of proportion" about things. Once you understand what it takes to send a satellite into orbit you know it can't be done with 1/10th. the energy. For me, the no-humans-on-earth knowledge provides this baseline that cannot be explained away with the usual hand-wavy argument that seem to permeate this domain. Another interesting look is the CO2 contributions of various countries or regions. Here's a look at that: Here's a picture of that answers that question: https://i.imgur.com/wbHptnf.png https://i.imgur.com/wbHptnf.png Looking at this it is clear we have a very serious challenge in our hands. To repeat myself, if all of humanity was beamed into space by Captain Pickard, it would take a thousand years for a 1 ppm drop in CO2. Clearly, looking at this graph, completely erasing a number of these countries off the face of this planet would not be equivalent to all of humanity disappearing into space. Which mean, by simple deduction, that the rate of reduction of CO2 --if any-- would be much slower than 1 ppm per 1000 years. Erasing the entire US from the planet would have no effect whatsoever. The US and China? Same problem. Erase 3/4 of these planets and the problem remains: The rate of change will never be better than 1 ppm per 1000 years. Well, then, does this mean efforts to reduce CO2 emissions are pointless, futile, nonsensical? No, of course not. I do think that we are pushing a massive lie by claiming to be able to materially affect matters of planetary scale in just a few tens or dozens of years. It just makes no sense at all. In fact, it is my opinion that such talk is truly counterproductive and should be treated as comedy or, at best, opportunism aimed at making money given the current drive to promote such matters. There are, of course, lots of reasons to decarbonize to the extent possible. I think most of them boil down to living in healthier environments, healthier cities, homes and buildings. Most people don't understand the environment they live in on a daily basis. These are two images from my office. The first is with windows open for an hour or so. The second could be any other day of the week, with windows closed all day. https://i.imgur.com/k9qufys.png https://i.imgur.com/k9qufys.png https://i.imgur.com/DQL2Kr2.png https://i.imgur.com/DQL2Kr2.png Just looking at CO2, that's a 1000 ppm delta. This is why I urge people to spend a few dollars and get an air quality meter. You'll learn things about where you live and what you do every day you could not imagine. For example, driving in a car for a couple of hours per day means you are in a 1400+ ppm environment for the duration of your travel. Product Idea for Your Startup ----------------------------- Provide for an easy way to inject clean air into an environment. It could be as simple as a 1 inch tube that makes it into the air handler through a HEPA filter and injects fresh air into the system. Almost anything is better than recirculating bad air. Today most homes don't have a sensible way to accomplish this. These things, to me, would be truly disruptive (like the easy-to-install zone system). Otherwise you are competing with the same product against established companies with products that are not materially different in a way that matters. Going back to your question: What would be the proper approach? Almost impossible to answer. It's like going back 50 years and asking someone from the 1970's what the world might be like in 2023. No clue. I would say we need to continue pushing for everything we do to be as clean and environmentally friendly as possible. Not due to a delusion about being able to save the planet or reverse climate change. I am not sure I have seen any evidence of this being realistically attainable. No, we do it because it will make for healthier living and health is crucially important. We can justify full electrification and migration away from burning fuels in the long run based on this premise, that of creating a healthier future for everyone on the planet. That, to me, would be a sensible narrative everyone could get behind. The problem with pushing a questionable narrative is that the entire planet will eventually see the "emperor has no clothes" effect. The backlash would not be trivial at all. It is better, in my opinion, to talk about healthy living than claiming to be able to affect rapid change of a planetary scale. I'll leave you with this link to a paper published some time ago by Google Research. I admire the guts of the researchers who dared publish such a conclusion at a time when this could be career-ending. Their conclusion still holds. And, yes, pushing for us to get cleaner at all levels still has significant value. https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...