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Comment by jwitchel | Hacker News Reader

Moved to renewables. Wanted to try and help with climate change and needed new challenges.

Solar is a fantastic industry. Lots of room for improvement feels like internet did in thr mid 90s. Just a ton of enthusiasm and a sense you're part of something big and important.

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Did the same but as a dev. Created this list for my fellow devs who want to do the same https://github.com/pogopaule/awesome-sustainability-jobs

This is exactly what I've been looking to find. Thank you for putting it together.

You should make a standalone post of it.

ok, will do

Thank you so much for this!

You are very welcome

Thanks!

Could you give a sense about what the interesting problems there are? I get the sense (knowing nothing) that it's maybe similar to ML in the sense that only a few top research labs does all the fun stuff. The internet in the 90s had tons of low hanging fruit just about anyone could pluck.

Energy is fundamentally an economic problem so you're looking for places that reduce the incremental cost to deliver a kWh of renewable energy consistently over a long period of time. There is a shocking amount of soft costs (lawyers, permitting, financing, insurance, monitoring, sales, etc.) in renewables. Software can help with a lot of that. Fintech too.

The scale of our global energy infrastructure is incredible so small gains can have outsized impacts. I encourage you to just dig in.

Can only speak for ourselves, but at Solar Monkey we make software for solar panel installers and consumers. We have plenty of fun challenges! Like figuring out how to make it easy for sales people to design (electrically) valid solar panel set ups, as well as determining whether systems perform well for consumers based on yield data (with both analytical and ML models).

could you please describe how you did the switch?

I came to terms with the belief that it was important for me to try and help with what I viewed as the critical problem of our time.

I just couldn't sit on the sidelines any more.

After that leap it was simply aligning my personal skills with various opportunities until I found a good fit. I looked broadly for a while: reforestation, fintech, residential installations, real estate, utility scale, training, open source, enterprise software, venture, etc. And I'm fundamentally an entrepreneur and a capitalist so I looked for problems through that lens.

But for me that process began with the same basic question every engineer has almost every day: "What is the problem, and what can I do to help fix it?"

What is it you do in the industry?

That would help with climate change, but the biggest part is reducing our consumption in all senses. For example, my electricity bill is 10€/month, I have no fridge, use no heating, no hot water, so I'd totally be able to live with just a small solar panel, as I almost never use a device that requires a high power (I eat mostly raw fruits/vegs, more rarely eggs, fish or rice)

I mean, kudos to you, but the vast, vast majority of people (myself included) are not willing to give up refrigerators, or heat, or hot water, so your approach really isn't relevant give the scale needed to solve the problem.

I haven't done so myself either, but as the time passes I increasingly become convinced that the only available options for vast majority of population will be to do it now on your own terms or be forced to do it with everyone else later.

I like how as a people, we exploded with technology and capabilities, and now supposedly need to return to living like a cave man. I just hope that people who decide to live that way can cope with the fact that all the rich people and politicians will still live in affluence no matter what

"like a cave man" → I advocate for cherry-picking what's really useful in our modern societies: internet, a laptop, runnable water, electricity, and saving energy and resources for all the rest because we're reaching our limits on this planet. But that's hard to pass this message without making people feel "guilty" (which again is not my point at all)

If you "explode with technology and capabilities" while externalizing a lot of their costs to future generations, what other outcome can you honestly expect? The future starts now.

sure, I just gave an almost extreme example for our capitalist societies, but just reducing their consumption by 20%-50% is easily achievable for most people, and that makes a huge difference

That sounds horrible haha, each to their own. I used to live like that when I had no money, maybe I’m a bit biased

I think I’ll wait till corporates are mandated to reduce waste at scale before I go that far. Ever seen how much waste a single Dominos store makes per day? Can’t recycle greased cardboard

Same here as a student, but I kept that lifestyle since then because I like that simplicity, the amount of money I earn doesn't change anything to that

Why doesn’t using solar for heat & refrigeration do as much as foregoing heat & refrigeration? Isn’t the climate problem due to using non-renewables, and the emissions that come from physical construction, and not from energy use per se?

What do you envision as realistic for society, and how could we actually get there? Is it realistic for families with children to go without heat or refrigeration? How about senior citizens? As much as I agree that consumption should be reduced in a general sense, I’m a bit skeptical of “personal responsibility” solutions, when a huge fraction of current emissions, perhaps the majority, come from corporations. Another massive fraction comes from personal vehicles. Heating & refrigeration is pretty far down the list of big problems, if we’re going to be realistic about what the “biggest part” is, right?

When you see the amount of waste generated by hospitals, I would think twice before increasing the risk of food poisoning....

I feel like I know you :)

Are you doing software in that field, or are you an entirely different sort of engineer now? If so, did you have to obtain some kind of certification? Can you tell us about how that works?

I stayed in software and specifically fintech software where I spent most of my career.

There are aspects of renewables that require certification or licenses depending on your country (electrical work for example). But most of the work does not.

What is your typical day? Did you need any certifications etc?

One of the few interviews I accepted was for a renewable management company. It does change the motivation a bit.

do you think NEM 3.0 is coming and will it kill the residential solar industry?

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