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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
I'm sorry but that sounds wildly idealistic. "If everyone acted in a certain way, the world would be perfect and we'd have peace forever."
People drive SUVs, eat burgers, and travel on jet planes because it's fun and cheap. Make those things less cheap, say by introducing carbon taxes, and people will do less of them. It's really really hard to get people to change their lifestyles absent any immediate, external pressure.
It's awesome that you're doing all those things. I do many of them too (biking to work, shopping 2nd hand for many things, stubbornly repairing electronics etc) but not because I think it has any substantial impact. I do because it's the right thing to do and because it presents a positive example. It can show others that a rich, fulfilling life is possible without the frills of consumerism.
Kinda like "hey urribody, let's build a bunch of solar panels and wind farms, maybe build 3 or 4 nuclear plants too and we'll save the world"?
Or kinda like Y Combinator wanting to turn most of the Sahara into algal pools, where the desalination alone would use more electricity than humans currently produce, have worldwide implications on weather patterns due to the evaporation, and cause considerable impact on the health of the Amazon by drastically reducing how much dust crossed the ocean to fertilize it? http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/
The plans you're suggesting as too idealistic don't require the cooperation of every human being on the planet. Yours do.
They also hold the chance of turning someone a profit. Yours don't.
By definition, they're less idealistic than what you're proposing. They may be crazy, but definitely less idealistic. And have a higher chance of being tried out.
>The plans you're suggesting as too idealistic don't require the cooperation of every human being on the planet.
Every human being on the planet is part of the problem. And yes, turning the Sahara into enough tidal pools as outlined by that Y Combinator page would be the largest project in human history, the most expensive project in human history, would require more power plants than currently exist on the planet to be constructed solely for powering the project, would create an unimaginable amount of brine that couldn't be dumped back out at sea as it would kill all of the costal life of Northern Africa, would require construction efforts in 11 countries...
Solar has a very limited range of latitudes that make it effective and would require massive amounts of batteries to replace power at night/during periods of less than cooperative weather.
Wind is even more limited in where it may be employed, you need consistent wind but not too much wind.
Hydroelectric requires dams and flooding large swaths of land and are pretty limited to where they can actually be constructed.
Writing some code that makes a process work a little more efficiently doesn't make a meaningful impact on overall power consumption.
Etc etc, so on and so forth.
All human beings are causing the problem (even primitive, uncontacted, tribes as they're likely generating more carbon from their fires than they are actively sequestering) so all human beings need to participate in retarding, and reversing, their greenhouse gas emissions.
And it's still smaller than what you suggest. Think about that.
> Writing some code that makes a process work a little more efficiently doesn't make a meaningful impact on overall power consumption.
Sorry, you're saying an engineer cutting their personal meat consumption is more effective than that same engineer making entire power plants more efficient? I think they should be doing both but the latter is far more effective, for that one person to do.
> all human beings need to participate
Cool. Let me know if you figure out how to do that.
So... corporate action is meaningless because other companies will continue to pollute. Technological advancements are meaningless because other countries will continue to use old tech.
But... individual actions are meaningful because... other people won't continue to live wastefully... I guess? I don't see the logic here at all.
Exactly the thought I had. I do generally agree with the feeling that consumerism fuels waste and therefore unneeded emissions, but to suggest that radical change happens at the personal level and not at the corporate level seems off.
To the point:
> Developing software or a widget to optimize one's impact is just selling people hopium.
Wouldn’t shaving 1% of emissions for a manufacturing company reduce emissions far more than me reducing my emissions by cutting out meat for a week? Intuitively, small cuts at a large scale across many companies would save us much more than small cuts at a small scale across many people.
Anyways, I think it must be attacked from all these angles. But in my view, corporate emissions should be the bigger target. Sure, we could all be blamed for the problem. But individuals make choices based on what is available to them at the time with the resources they have. Most people never take an international fight and many never set foot on an airplane at all. Most people in the world are poor.
Individual action is great for environmentalists, but it will never be enough when the vast majority of people don't care about their own emissions. A carbon tax will make everything you mention more expensive and doesn't rely on ignorant truck drivers to switch to Priuses or travel-lovers to stop traveling.
Renewables have already made a significant difference in CO2 emissions. It’s rather shocking how much wind + solar are dominating new generation simple due to cost savings.
That’s covering a subset of US energy usage as they ignore things like passive solar heating and crops etc. It’s useful when comparing specific kinds of resources, but it’s important to consider the context and assumptions used.
In terms of electricity generation solar+wind is about 10% of total generation which is a massive increase from 2010.
Renewables are also extremely limited in practical use.
- The sun only shines so many hours a day and only certain latitudes are good candidates.
- Wind is quite noisy (sorry but it is, we've got a lot of wind here in Indiana that I've driven by going from Indy to Chicago. Absolutely not something I'd want near me. Much smaller scale vertical wind turbines are also quite loud and just plain annoying at higher speeds) and is ineffective at slow and high wind speeds, the wind also only blows at certain times.
- Hydroelectric generally requires dams, constructing dams often floods large areas of land which completely destroys ecosystems in that flooded land and often poses a considerable risk to downstream human settlements in the event of a catastrophic failure. They also rely heavily on obscene amounts of concrete which will build in a large amount of CO2 production into the construction.
- Hydroelectric relying on waves has varying level of impact on coastal ecosystems.
With sun and wind you can only implement it so far before you hit a wall, the wall being the need for huge amounts of grid storage to serve dark/not windy times.
Without drastic developments in battery technology, and PV efficiency, renewable aren't going to be a singular solution. They're going to remain a small percentage of the solution.
Renewables are also something that aren't really an option at a consumer level. You often have one power company that serves your home/apartment, if you do have a home and you live in an area where PV makes sense from a light availability then it is often more expensive than most people can afford and can take decades to be break even. Tesla announced something like $21.85 per square foot for their solar roof which comes to $43,700 for a 2,000 square foot home while in large parts of the country you can get a decent 2,000 square foot home for $100-200k and the median household income in the United States is only $63,688.
However adjusting your thermostat 1F warmer in the summer and 1F cooler in the winter, going to a local museum instead of taking that roadtrip or flight, eating hamburger once every other week instead of a few times a week etc are all far more practical changes people can implement in their lives than say installing PV and battery systems at their home or instead of buying an EV that costs thousands (if not tens of thousands) more than the ICE vehicle they'd otherwise purchase.
It's awesome, legitimately awesome, to pursue technology to help us solve the problem but thinking technology will be our savior is foolish at best. We have to radically change our lives if we want to even significantly slow those annual CO2 emissions. Food, clothing, recreation, convenience all needs to change.
It's not even that difficult. In the past year or so I've:
- Gone 90-95% whole food plant based with my eating
- Stopped going to the movies every other week and now only go for big films like the most recent Star Wars
- Stopped buying printed books if a digital copy is available for purchase
- Buy in bulk, with as little packaging as possible, when I can.
- Stopped driving 25-40 miles roundtrip every weekend to go sit in the living rooms of friends when we're just going to have the same conversations we do via text messages and instead only go see them once every couple of months each to eat together and actually have quality conversation
- Stopped driving to the fancy grocery 10 miles away and use the one a block from my apartment complex entrance, doing my groceries on the way home from work when I'm passing it anyway
- I pretty much only drive to work and church now instead of getting in my car on the weekend and driving around looking for something to do
- Video content I stream, I stream at lower quality now. Every gigabyte of data transfer saved is potentially several hundred of grams less CO2 generated. Podcasts, where available, I stream via their lower bitrate feed (unfortunately of the podcasts I listen to, only Mysterious Universe has a lower/higher quality feed).
If even 10% of the population adapted similar practices, you'd create much more of an impact than selling a few solar roofs to the wealthy or designing a piece of software for a regional power plant to use to make some process a fraction of a percent more efficient.
The Tesla roof is not representative of the market. Their targeting a market segment that’s not going to buy an ‘ugly’ solar panel. It’s the same reason their selling a 250k roadster and a 35k car at the same time.
Anyway, most people pay for solar installations via loans. Generally the out of pocket costs are close to zero and monthly costs are equivalent to grid power. In some cases installing solar is a pure cost savings with zero upfront costs and lower monthly costs.
> Renewables are also extremely limited in practical use.
From my experience, they are a lot less limited than people realize. The UK's use of wind is a good example [0], studies have been done in Australia where we previously thought the upper limit of renewables would be 20% of power generation only 10 years ago, each yeah they are revising this number upwards thanks to technology developments. South Australia is a good example here too [1].
Just because we can't easily foresee a solution that is 100% renewable/carbon free energy generation _right now_, doesn't mean we shouldn't head in that direction. Waiting around for a perfect solution and sitting on our hands is exactly what we shouldn't be doing.
Also in regards to your comments for individual behaviors impacting the planet, turns out people can walk and chew gum at the same time. I'm vegan, avoid flying (haven't flown in >5 years), work remote and have solar panels on my house. Making personal changes like you and I (and many others and growing) have done absolutely makes a difference, but so does the technology development. For example
> With sun and wind you can only implement it so far before you hit a wall, the wall being the need for huge amounts of grid storage to serve dark/not windy times.
I work mainly in the solar radiation forecasting area, basically thickness of clouds forecasts. Something that the _tech_ we've developed performs really well at is forecasting the next 4 hours, updating every 5-15 minutes thanks to the amazing tech that is the latest generation of geostationary weather satellites. As you likely know, one of the important properties of an electricity grid is stability which the intermittent nature of renewables like solar don't excel (as you've pointed out) at especially if you live anywhere there are commonly clouds. One way to improve stability is to smooth out the variability and to know ahead of time how much the power output is going to change. You might think this is just a 1-2% improvement but actually this is impacts _how much_ solar power generation to can add to an electricity grid by a lot and it also GREATLY reduces the size of battery required to get that smoothing of power generation. Does it get us to 100% renewable energy generation? No, but it lets us rush for higher penetration whilst maintaining stability in electricity networks, which helps generators make money, which makes investment look more attractive, which builds more solar, you see the cycle.
So yes, you can only implement them so far, but how far this can be taken is generally rising in many countries, and getting there quickly is important.
Yes, if everyone made the individual choices today, the world could drop our CO2 emissions very quickly in a short period of time. Social problems are hard and sadly we have leaders without the political will to go against their own personal self interest and that of their large emitter donors [2]. So while some lobby to try and change this, others try to encourage those with money from their large emissions to put their money somewhere else that will reduce emissions by making it more profitable. A carrot AND a stick as it were. It isn't just "hopeium", people in these fields are working their butts off and the inertia is building, it's not going to be easy so yes I think the future is bright _for the climate tech industry_ as there are positive contributions to be made. As for the general future re climate change, no, it is not looking bright but working to make it less shit is something I'd encourage others to do.
Wind varies wildly between locations. England being an island probably helps a ton as coastal areas tend to generally be windy. If we look at a wiki entry [1] on the coastline of the UK:
>the coastline as measured by the standard method at Mean High Water Mark rises to about 19,491 miles (31,368 km).
With the general coasltine of the United States being 12,383 miles.
The UK also has nearly 1/5 the population, has virtually no air conditioning while 16% of residential electricit consumption and 6% of total electrical consumption in the United States is from air conditioning [2].
So there is limited carryover here with something like wind. Same goes for solar, solar is great at certain latitudes and in certain regions (think weather) but other latitudes and regions is just not practical.
The UK is also much smaller than something like the United States, that means a much more efficient grid can be constructed. You will also just have less transmission loss because you have much fewer units of measure of power lines.
Granted regarding wind, but there are a lot of coastal areas in the world and other windy non coastal regions as well. As for solar and latitudes, this is primarily an economic choice, so while yes some areas of the world will produce more watts/m^2 (see global maps of Global Horizontal Irradience), solar utility generation can still make economic sense |in or near a lot of populated places around the globe. Sure, high density islands would be a silly use of space for solar but being islands, wind would likely make more sense|.
And yes, transmission of power is also a problem for places like Australia being so large, but even with this people are genuinely looking into building large _international_ electricity connections under sea between north of Australia and Singapore [0] backed by 10GW of solar generation capacity [1], a $20B investment that they are willing to bet will _make_ money, not heavily gov funded.
A lot of people are also looking at hydrogen generation from excess renewable power as another way to recoup some profit when grid generation prices go to 0 or negative. Deciding _when_ to do these kinds of activities is largely where _climate tech_ can help out. Again, even relatively small improvements allow for larger shifts if what we do and can have a large impact of investment including how attractive the scaling of these technologies can be. Because energy generation and consumption are such fundamental parts of modern life, being clever with how you do both of these things can lead to whole different approaches. As clean energy generation costs drop there will be other carbon net negative (maybe negative) activities that become economical, creating a space where money can be mode is the fastest way to accelerate change in the modern world.
Some of these choices will no doubt cause their own problems that will need to be solved, but at this stage world needs to look towards harm minimization, and quickly when it comes to the climate crises. With hindsight I'm sure we'll be able to look back and highlight ways it could have been done better, hell we can do that now but those with the power to make that change seem unwilling to show leadership.
If you are a programmer/technical minded person, climate tech is still a positive contribution and I think is an industry that will be growing. If you are a politician, yes, you'll likely have the _chance_ to make a far larger impact and all power to you, but I'll be doing what I can with the skills and knowledge I have.
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.