Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I used to work at a fitness tech startup, but then when it didn't work out (heh), I took a step back and wondered what industry I wanted to be a part of. I wondered if a software engineer could help contribute to fighting climate change, so I started asking around.

I found a job in solar, then eventually started my own clean energy software company. Every day I wake up with the incredible feeling that I'm getting paid to fight climate change. If feels good, and I'd like to encourage you to consider joining the industry, too.

It turns out there's a huge need for software and other tech skills (data science, sysadmin, etc.) needed for the energy transition. With the deployment of so much "intermittent" generation like solar and wind, we need fuck tons of software and communications infrastructure to run a new "flexible" grid. For example, the California ISO is using neural networks to formulate the day-ahead markets, and recently started letting aggregated demand response providers (e.g. companies who manage smart thermostats) bid into the market as distributed generators.

So if you're thinking what can you to help fight climate change, the best thing you can do is get a job in the climate change fighting industry. Start googling around for jobs with climate change keywords ("solar", "wind", "clean energy", etc.). Start showing up to clean energy events (if you live in the bay area, check out my bayareaenergyevents.com). There's so many people in this space who came from other sectors, and it's incredibly easy to move up or start your own company doing some specific thing you think is needed for the fight. Also, feel free to reach out to me or read my previous comments on this topic.

"They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"

How https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240 could be captured at a consumer / DIY scale?

From their post:

> The only inputs to make the fuel are CO2 and water (both from the air) and electricity. The only outputs are fuel and oxygen.

---

> instead [we] use a process that uses only electricity (no natural gas, etc) and does it at room temperature.

---

> we absorb CO2 and water vapor from the air into an aqueous electrolyte.

---

> We then react the CO2 in the water with a copper catalyst to directly make alcohols like ethanol, butanol, propanol, etc

> we have a carbon nanotube membrane that replaces it, extracting the alcohols from water in a single step at room temperature

I think the question boils down to: How to remove CO2 from air through "aqueous electrolyte", then convert it to alcohols with "copper catalyst"?

Hmmm, I'm sure the tech is great as well as the scientists and engineering perfecting it. However, I consider this kind of tech important in a post-energy transition world and probably a bad idea to pursue now.

Converting CO2 to hydrocarbons is a fundamentally an endothermic reaction (e.g. it needs energy to happen), so given the limits on process and thermodynamic efficiencies, it will always take more energy to convert CO2 back into gasoline than the energy you got from burning the fuel in the first place. So it seems like what they are proposing is throwing 1x of one type of energy (electricity) at undoing the effects of less than 1x of another type of energy (fossil fuels used in transportation).

Maybe that would be a good idea if we had excess clean electricity generation and couldn't effectively decarbonize transportation, but neither of those are true.

First, we currently need all the clean electricity generation we can get our hands on, and aren't anywhere close to fully decarbonizing the grid to the point where we have excess capacity for stuff like this. Spending 1 megawatt-hour on this for less than 1 megawatt-hour of impact when it could be use to straight up replace 1 megawatt-hour of fossil generation is, I think, a waste of resources right now.

Second, electrification of transportation is starting to happen exponentially, so many of the things you were looking to offset in the short term will probably just cease to exist over the next 10-20 years. The exception is air travel, where the energy density and having propellants are super important, but then you're competing with the price of producing biofuels as a carbon neutral alternative. I suspect that biofuel production will be cheaper, simply because the energy required to grow the algae or convert the cellulose is less than the co2 reversal they are proposing here, but I could be wrong about that for process reasons other than thermodynamics (e.g. capital expenses, etc.). However, focusing on decarbonizing air travel is sooo far down the list of priorities right now. There's so much more lower hanging fruit we should be investing in.

Overall, I think spending energy sucking co2 out of the air and converting it into fuel isn't a good idea right now. Maybe in the medium term if it can compete with biofuels, and definitely in the long term after we've decarbonized as much as possible and still need to remove co2 from the atmosphere. But when I see investment dollars get thrown at this instead contributing towards deploying 1:1 replacements of fossil fuels, I feel a bit sad. Mostly because I know it will be used by propagandists for delaying decarbonization efforts (e.g. "See? We have tech than can undo all these fossil fuels we're emitting! So we're all good and don't need to electrify transportation.").

Tagging onto this to see if anyone knows of resources for jobs in Canada. I search every once in awhile for those key terms but finding an intersection with software jobs yields basically nothing.

Can you give examples of data science used by companies to fight climate change? I mean how companies used data analytics to fight climate change, as I know academic/governmental research projects analyzing climate change have used data extensively.

Sure! A good one is battery storage.

When you install a battery in a building in order to manage load more effectively, how do you know when you should charge and discharge the battery? There's a ton of complexities going all the way from not hurting the battery by cycling it too much, to tariff complexities for optimizing the maximum dollar impact to the customer. Then throw on top of that new incentive programs that start to pay out for things like demand response, frequency control, and load shifting for the overall grid. The term in the storage space is called "value stacking", and it's a very hard problem that requires a ton of data and calculations.

Sounds like a great gig for data scientist!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com