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?
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.
> 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.
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
You have to be a bit careful here, though. If you think that "policy and regulatory reform" means international agreements limiting greenhouse gases are the way to go, unfortunately I am afraid you are in for a really long wait. On the other hand, policies that push for new technologies, then kind of yes, but then it is more difficult to distinguish which one, the policies or technologies are the more important source of leverage (personally I do no think that it is even a feasible comparison).
For example, "everyone" is laughing at Germany's super Energiewende that it is a expensive failure that has not managed to reduce Germany's dependence for coal at all. But then, if you have a look when Germany has built solar, it's share of the global new capacity at that time and compare that tho the learning curve and price development of solar, it is a bit difficult to conclude anything but Germany's policies have pretty much singlehandedly brought solar from laughably expensive novelty to something that actually can be competitive in certain markets. Then China continued from there, and now we are extremely close (if not already over) a tipping point where solar just keeps getting cheaper subsidized or not.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is a good point. Demand flexibility is a great resource.
However, effectively zero consumers pay the spot price currently. Distribution utilities worry that time-varying electricity prices (1) are confusing to consumers (2) any change in rates triggers regulatory review and creates winners and losers (i.e. some bills go up, others go down).
I work with utilities, and we are seeing a lot more interest in time of use and dynamic pricing. I think EVs will help a lot with socializing time-varying prices. Incentivizing consumers to charge at night is hugely beneficial for everyone, which means you can roll it out to consumers in a way that always reduces costs, making it feel less punitive than a time-varying rate that otherwise might help or hurt.
It's not so crazy to me that we try to maintain the same quality of life. Watching the meter and waiting until 9 PM to wash your clothes is a pretty sad state of affairs. Sweating through your clothes in a heat wave because everyone else wants AC is even worse.
Are we really ready to admit that the late 20th century was peak civilization? It seems to me we have solved all the wrong problems with technology (nitrogen fixation, disease, etc) that put natural checks on population several hundred years before we were ready to actively plan and manage population. As a result, all the problems introduced by overpopulation that are fundamentally unsolvable are getting worse and worse.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nuclear is not going to happen in time and other technologies that are completely uncontroversial are already running circles around it for the past decade in terms of cost and growth (which would be negative for nuclear). I don't expect meaningful results to come from nuclear investments in the next decades. This would be the same period of time most modern countries will cross the 50-100% covered by renewable energy mark. Much of the current deployed nuclear capacity might actually end up being retired in the same period because most of it is already on the edge of it's economic life and replacements are controversial from a cost perspective (never mind the safety). The status quo is that nuclear plants are multi billion $ projects that take decades to plan and realize and that have very dubious economics.
100% renewable everywhere is not going to happen everywhere in the next two decades; but there are plenty of countries shooting for that on a 15-20 year time line. In 20 years, most of the remaining countries will be actively planning to catch up in a hurry or simply end up importing excess energy from more clued in places at a premium. Even approved plans for nuclear plants (of which there are preciously few) would probably take longer to realize; and lets face it, mostly these plans reside in some drawer gathering dust.
Nuclear is not a solution short term (< 20 years) or mid term (< 40 years) and long term (>40 years) it will have to be cost competitive with vastly cheaper than today renewables. Which is a different way of saying the winter olympics will be organized in hell regularly.
Nuclear security alone makes it a non starter from a cost point of view. Any nuclear reactor requires 24x7 security to prevent people from depopulating their local area with a bit of explosives. Micro reactors make excellent dirty bombs and with tens of thousands of them around it's more a question of when than if somebody manages to do this. The resulting security requirements alone makes them impractical, even if they would be able to compete with the renewable solutions that will be common in a few decades. These are likely to be vastly cheaper than what we have today. The main question is how many orders of magnitude cheaper things can get before people stop caring about the price. Below a certain price, using excess renewable energy to synthesize all sorts of fuels will also become vastly cheaper than refining oil no matter how inefficient that is from an energy point of view (and it's actually not that bad). Ironically, refining oil requires a lot of energy, which comes from ... renewables. That's why Texas leads everyone else with solar and wind deployments.
Good luck moving container ships without diesel. You'll also have to put the passenger airlines and air cargo carriers completely out of business.
It is honestly something we need to do but doing so would require every continent to rely entirely upon the resources on that continent. It would also mean all of those hundreds of millions to billions of newly middle class folks around the world would have to give up their newly won quality of life and go back to living how they were before.
We either have to radically change society on nearly every level or cross our fingers and hope a humanitarian (alientarian?) fleet of alien ships show up in orbit with highly advanced technology that can replace all of our energy needs AND actively remove huge amounts of CO2 out of the air.
[+] [-] layoric|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] jointpdf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmercer|6 years ago|reply
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-medi...
[2] https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2018/10/30/an-open-...
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
Refreshing to hear this from someone working in climate tech.
[+] [-] lorenzhs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefield|6 years ago|reply
For example, "everyone" is laughing at Germany's super Energiewende that it is a expensive failure that has not managed to reduce Germany's dependence for coal at all. But then, if you have a look when Germany has built solar, it's share of the global new capacity at that time and compare that tho the learning curve and price development of solar, it is a bit difficult to conclude anything but Germany's policies have pretty much singlehandedly brought solar from laughably expensive novelty to something that actually can be competitive in certain markets. Then China continued from there, and now we are extremely close (if not already over) a tipping point where solar just keeps getting cheaper subsidized or not.
[+] [-] bernardlunn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|6 years ago|reply
Someone in climate tech supporting forcing their tech onto consumers is refreshing? Seems absolutely normal.
People in climate tech are more about fundamentalist morality than improving the world through actual advances.
[+] [-] rfeather|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maliker|6 years ago|reply
However, effectively zero consumers pay the spot price currently. Distribution utilities worry that time-varying electricity prices (1) are confusing to consumers (2) any change in rates triggers regulatory review and creates winners and losers (i.e. some bills go up, others go down).
I work with utilities, and we are seeing a lot more interest in time of use and dynamic pricing. I think EVs will help a lot with socializing time-varying prices. Incentivizing consumers to charge at night is hugely beneficial for everyone, which means you can roll it out to consumers in a way that always reduces costs, making it feel less punitive than a time-varying rate that otherwise might help or hurt.
[+] [-] papreclip|6 years ago|reply
Are we really ready to admit that the late 20th century was peak civilization? It seems to me we have solved all the wrong problems with technology (nitrogen fixation, disease, etc) that put natural checks on population several hundred years before we were ready to actively plan and manage population. As a result, all the problems introduced by overpopulation that are fundamentally unsolvable are getting worse and worse.
[+] [-] yachtman|6 years ago|reply
Therefore lets make it illegal not to care?? You need to think more pragmatically.
[+] [-] EpicEng|6 years ago|reply
Meh, whatever; I need to start my laundy so it's ready before I go to bed. I'll eat the $30.
[+] [-] marshmellowtest|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTko|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dd36|6 years ago|reply
Yaaaaass!
[+] [-] mariushn|6 years ago|reply
FYI https://www.iisd.org/gsi/ https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=e1210
[+] [-] witten|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepangolino|6 years ago|reply
Should have been on top, front and center of the article.
[+] [-] maliker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fakeNewsIsHere|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mattygh|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] allovernow|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] teslabox|6 years ago|reply
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...
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.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] altacc|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jansan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maliker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trengorilla|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Beltiras|6 years ago|reply
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/ [2] https://www.seaborg.co/
[+] [-] L_Rahman|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _Microft|6 years ago|reply
DAC: direct air capture
MSR: molten salt reactor
[+] [-] adrianN|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|6 years ago|reply
100% renewable everywhere is not going to happen everywhere in the next two decades; but there are plenty of countries shooting for that on a 15-20 year time line. In 20 years, most of the remaining countries will be actively planning to catch up in a hurry or simply end up importing excess energy from more clued in places at a premium. Even approved plans for nuclear plants (of which there are preciously few) would probably take longer to realize; and lets face it, mostly these plans reside in some drawer gathering dust.
Nuclear is not a solution short term (< 20 years) or mid term (< 40 years) and long term (>40 years) it will have to be cost competitive with vastly cheaper than today renewables. Which is a different way of saying the winter olympics will be organized in hell regularly.
Nuclear security alone makes it a non starter from a cost point of view. Any nuclear reactor requires 24x7 security to prevent people from depopulating their local area with a bit of explosives. Micro reactors make excellent dirty bombs and with tens of thousands of them around it's more a question of when than if somebody manages to do this. The resulting security requirements alone makes them impractical, even if they would be able to compete with the renewable solutions that will be common in a few decades. These are likely to be vastly cheaper than what we have today. The main question is how many orders of magnitude cheaper things can get before people stop caring about the price. Below a certain price, using excess renewable energy to synthesize all sorts of fuels will also become vastly cheaper than refining oil no matter how inefficient that is from an energy point of view (and it's actually not that bad). Ironically, refining oil requires a lot of energy, which comes from ... renewables. That's why Texas leads everyone else with solar and wind deployments.
[+] [-] usrusr|6 years ago|reply
If nuclear was as safe as technological DAC is solved we'd all be dead already from radiation ten times over.
[+] [-] ryanmercer|6 years ago|reply
Good luck moving container ships without diesel. You'll also have to put the passenger airlines and air cargo carriers completely out of business.
It is honestly something we need to do but doing so would require every continent to rely entirely upon the resources on that continent. It would also mean all of those hundreds of millions to billions of newly middle class folks around the world would have to give up their newly won quality of life and go back to living how they were before.
We either have to radically change society on nearly every level or cross our fingers and hope a humanitarian (alientarian?) fleet of alien ships show up in orbit with highly advanced technology that can replace all of our energy needs AND actively remove huge amounts of CO2 out of the air.