Request for Startups: Climate Tech | Hacker News Reader

Request for Startups: Climate Tech

ycombinator.com

287 pointsjeremylevy273 comments

I've worked in "climate intelligence" for many years. The list overlooks one of the largest and most immediate opportunities around that market: the data infrastructure and analysis tools we have today are profoundly unfit for purpose. Just about everyone is essentially using cartography tools to do large-scale spatiotemporal analysis of sensor and telemetry data. The gaps for both features and practical scalability are massive.

It has made most of the climate intelligence analysis we'd like to do, and for which data is available, intractable. And what we can do is so computationally inefficient that we figuratively burn down a small forest every time we run an analysis on a non-trivial model, which isn't very green either.

(This is definitely something I'd work on if I had the bandwidth, it is a pretty pure deep tech software problem.)

Where could I read more about this problem and how it's being tackled today?

I hesitate to link to Twitter here, but Joe Morrison has his finger on the pulse of this and offers a tongue-in-cheek perspective that I appreciate: https://twitter.com/mouthofmorrison

Thanks for posting. His substack piece on the 3 m’s is very appropriate.

Out of curiosity, is accessing & working with large datasets a problem in your areas of work? I run a weather/climate site that makes some of this less painful, taking datasets such as GFS or ERA5/ERA5-Land much faster to access. We have some enterprise clients who really value the time-saving aspect of this but I also feel like everyone has their own data-processing set up and problems are different for everyone.

There are a couple issues I see with basic access and working with large datasets. Ease of access for typical users is also a valid issue.

First, we still mostly move the data to the computation when we should be moving the computation to the data. Moving the data works fine when data is small but if the data volumes are large (as sensor/geo data tends to be) then it can take an incredibly long time to move the data. In many cases, more time is spent shoveling data over the network than actually doing the computation. This has become worse as storage density has increased, hundreds of TB/server is ordinary.

Second, the data is rarely organized in a way that makes it efficient to extract arbitrary subsets. There is still a lot of what is essentially "grep at scale" going on. Again, not a problem if the data is small but if I need a specific 50TB subset of a 10PB source, this becomes prohibitively slow. The data needs to be organized such that we can slice and dice it with high selectivity in place, much more like a proper database and less of a distributed filesystem. Because spatiotemporal analysis tends to involve iterative join-like operations, you want this to be efficient as possible.

The other big problem is many of these data sources are too large for everyone to have their own copy. Or if they did have their own copy, it would be extraordinarily wasteful. This is adjacent to the first issue. EDIT: And herein is the likely business model.

Want to make sure you're familiar with the Pangeo community: www.pangeo.io

I don't think any of these challenges are "solved", but there's a groundswell of technology that is well-situated to make a big impact in these domains. The largest barriers that still remain are the ownership of engineering processes/workflow to transform larger gridded datasets to ARCO (analysis-ready, cloud-optimized) formats, as well as tooling to mediate between heterogeneous datasets (e.g. combining regular vs irregular or arbitrarily gridded data, such as land surveys or ZIP codes).

There are definitely players in the space working on these, but much is left to be done here.

+1 for Pangeo. We use these toolsets heavily (Xarray, Zarr, Dask) to run our service, which is essentially what you described as taking the larger gridded datasest to ARCO format. I think this is still a bit too heavy for casual Excel/GIS analysts so we try to make it as simple as possible for them to get climate data in CSV or NetCDF format for their work.

This sounds really interesting. Would be really interested to work around these things. Thinking and working a lot with similar-ish systems. But not sure how to enter the related green-tech space when living in Europe. Would love to try to build a product myself but then I need a customer to try ideas with.

We are building data storage and processing infrastructure at a company that connects DERs. This involves storing large amounts of structured, time-series data. This data is then further processed and used for all kinds use cases, many of which were mentioned in the first half of the post's article. (e.g. energy management systems, load management etc.)

I am planning to apply to YC, and similar VCs, probably as a non-profit.

I will build better risk models of extreme weather events.

If anyone is interested in joining as a co-founder, get in touch (see email in my profile).

Have you come across Kart? https://kartproject.org/

Any chance you guys provide a free api for the little guy? I would love to have access to climate data via a json rest api. Specifically historical temperature and precipitation data at minimum.

I poked around a while back and wasn't able to find much of anything on the web. Maybe I missed it?

Certainly - take a look (https://oikolab.com) and let me know your use case. There is a free tier but we've also given free access to a quite a few number of researchers, non-profits and university students for their projects when they reached out to us.

I own and operate a high intensity organic farm.

My use case is to attempt to predict how much water I can expect for the growing season and other growing conditions like date of last frost.

I'm trying to apply my software engineering skills to my farm. I am also researching automation strategies.

Your offering is most intriguing.

Sounds good - can you sign up for the free tier and send me an email to support@oikolab.com? This comes to me so I'll know which account belongs to you and we can take it from there.

I would also love any references to existing companies, research groups, or the problems in this space if you have the time to share. I found the posted list underwhelming and more of a marketing shotgun approach to try and take advantage of the push for "climate tech" but not solve any real problems.

Not OP, but in my experience:

Jupiter Intelligence (https://jupiterintel.com/)

Descartes Labs (https://descarteslabs.com/)

Microsoft Planetary Computer (https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/)

Coiled (managed Dask - python HPC) (https://www.coiled.io/)

CarbonPlan (https://carbonplan.org/)

Salo Sciences (acquired by Planet, satellite imagery company) (https://salo.ai/)

lots of others

Thank you!

This is an excellent point. I think the problem is that because it's such a pure software problem it doesn't have an immediate "climate tech" alignment, so it stands to "dilute" these kinds of calls for funding.

Companies with good climate intelligence tech tend to evolve in to marketplaces because that gets them closer to the money. Climate projects can't afford SaaS, but offset buyers are willing to pay a premium for offsets re-verified by high-tech climate intelligence SaaS.

Example: Pachama https://pachama.com/

I guess it would help to be more specific about how this differs from some of the measurement related startups they list. Taxonomies are difficult, so maybe they do need an entirely separate category, or enlarge the one related to measurement.

> Just about everyone is essentially using cartography tools to do large-scale spatiotemporal analysis of sensor and telemetry data. The gaps for both features and practical scalability are massive.

Could you point to any readings or resources that would explain these gaps? I'd be quite curious why our current spatiotemporal analysis techniques would be insufficient. Is it the analysis tools that just need new techniques or is the problem at the source (i.e. the sensors)? Or?

There aren’t really any problems. Some people see that because all of this data can be spatially and temporarily referenced, it can be accessed better, as if there could be one format and one application that could let you do anything you want across the space time, regardless of the source.

The reality is that a lots of models using this data are developed against a specific sensor or dataset, and just don’t work or scale.

I don’t think this will be solved in this domain by pangeo or any startup in particular.

There is an awesome new STACspec that every geo company should be adopting, and that’s the direction to move towards.

But each step towards standardizing the GIS process will require something that truly everyone can adopt, sort of like JSON.

Would you mind elaborating on say a few specific asks for tools climate people would want to have, that are low-hanging fruit that people might be able to write in their spare time?

I'm very interested in doing something for climate change but I'd like to know what people want.

What potential customers are there for climate intelligence systems?

Don't think of it as a "climate intelligence" system. It is really an "analyze complex dynamics in the physical world at global scale" system, one application of which is climate intelligence. Everything is fundamentally anchored to space and time, and connected by it.

The applicability cuts across industries. It would enable managing many kinds of risks that have nothing to do with climate.

Makes sense. Although to have such a big scope and understand how to satisfy such cross cutting concerns where tools aren't built yet it sounds like you you kind of need to understand a lot about everything.

I do see that when you really understand the problem you can build such a tool in a non-domain specific way as you describe without inconceivable effort but understanding up to that point is kind of the whole problem?

Edit: Btw, really sounds like a space where I would like to build stuff in. I kind of understand what you're aiming for but I feel like it's very easy to jump to conclusions and build air castles.

We need sensors for carbon presence over distance and time in the ocean. At huge scale, to test the viability of various carbon sequestration schemes. That's pretty expensive, with a large non-software component.

I know this from a peripheral involvement in one the XPRIZE projects.

Agree 100%. This is big part of the motivation behind our new startup Earthmover: https://earthmover.io/

Our mission is to make it easier to work with scientific data at scale in the cloud, focusing mainly on the climate, weather, and geospatial vertical.

My cofounder Joe Hamman and I are climate scientists who helped create the Pangeo project. We are also core devs on the Python packages Xarray and Zarr. We think that a layer of managed services (think a "modern data stack" oriented around the multidimensional array data model) is exactly what this ecosystem needs to make it easier for teams to build data-intensive products in the climate-tech space.

And we're hiring! https://earthmover.io/posts/earthmover-is-hiring/

I'm curious, have you considered using PyTorch or JAX for tensor processing? ML libraries seem to be much further along when it comes to performing compute-intensive, hardware-accelerated operations on Tensor's. And you get gradients basically for free (in terms of developer time). Also, the kernel compiler being added PyTorch 2 looks very promising.

PyTorch and JAX are used heavily in climate science on the ML side. For more general analytics, not so much. Many of our users like to use Xarray as a high-level API. There has been some work to integrate Xarray with PyTorch (https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/3232) but we're not there yet.

The Python Array API standard should help align these different back-ends: https://data-apis.org/array-api/latest/

The primary issue in this domain is not compute - it's I/O, especially when you need to perform complex computations with intermediate data that doesn't fit into memory.

Elixir?

Many lessons to be learned from Climate Corporation. They used satellite data and drones to make robust crop insurance and ended up being bought by Monsanto and changing their direction.

Almost all climate tech is greenwashing; superficial solutions. Climate issues require deeper system changes. We need a system which encourages financial prudence and frugality instead of one which encourages financial recklessness, infinite growth, consumerism and bullshit jobs. The problem needs to be solved at the lowest monetary incentive layer.

How much energy is wasted by people travelling to and from their bullshit jobs? How many flights they need to take each year for holidays in order to heal from the accumulated stress of their mind-numbing jobs? How much surplus consumption do these bullshit jobs generate? How much plastic is thrown on the side of the road and into the ocean because people are too concerned about their own survival to give a crap about the environment and the future of mankind?

It's quite clear that if we all had less money and worked fewer hours, we would produce less greenhouse gases and live healthier, more fulfilled lives. Unfortunately, the current system is only good at depriving money from some of the population (while giving others a huge surplus) and it only ever demands more hours of work from everyone... So it barely even solves half of the first problem while making everything else worse.

Ironically many YCombinator businesses support the opposite. Perhaps the first thing YC needs is a mirror.

Unfortunately they only fund things that people want, not things that people need.

That's one cultural point of view. Another point of view is that we should get ourselves in a position where we can produce (and consume) infinite clean energy, for example, but building a thousand nuclear power plants. Team mushrooms vs team cocaine.

We'd still have to take care of the plastics problem and also any population growth problem which would arise from that. It seems that historically, any improvements in efficiency has lead to population booms which negated the efficiency improvements. That's why I think the solution is systemic and cultural. The best that technology can offer IMO is to support a cultural shift and new incentive structures based on scarcity.

I'd say that the solutions should start from the top first.

100 companies are responsible for 71% of global GHG emissions.[1] That's a mind-boggling statistic.

The counterargument is, of course, that these companies are supplying the demand; that consumers should vote with their wallets, change their habits, recycle, reduce their "carbon footprint", etc. This is the usual deflection propaganda pushed by the companies themselves, and shills who benefit from them.

But the reality is that if only a fraction of these companies changed a fraction of their processes to lower their emissions, or—heaven forbid—reduced their growth and shareholder profits, the positive impact would be far, far greater than anything individuals could ever do.

It's ludicrously counterproductive to invest in _new_ companies to reduce our effects on the climate, while existing companies are the major cause of the problems we're trying to solve. It's like we're in a sinking ship, trying to remove the water with buckets, instead of patching up the hole the water is rushing in, and stopping the assholes who made it in the first place.

I'm not saying climate tech companies shouldn't exist. But let's get our priorities straight first.

[1]: https://www.cdp.net/en/articles/media/new-report-shows-just-...

>100 companies are responsible for 71% of global GHG emissions.

I've always found that stat to be misleading, as it uses the word "responsible" in a very unconventional way: essentially, GHG emissions come from fossil fuels extracted by these companies, even though the companies themselves aren't the ones using the fossil fuels nor producing the GHGs.

This upstream analysis just doesn't seem very useful to me. You mention

>If only a fraction of these companies changed a fraction of their processes[...]

but I fail to see how China Coal (top 1), Saudi Aramco (2nd), or Gazprom (3rd) could do anything about their process to significantly reduce the amount of emmisions from their products.

It's true that the world does need to structurally change to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but going after the producers would at best be a confusing way to apply a carbon tax.

Other solutions from climate tech like better electricity production and storage needs to happen simultaneously, not after by "getting our priorities straight".

> I've always found that stat to be misleading, as it uses the word "responsible" in a very unconventional way

I used that word, while the original article[1] and report[2] use "linked to". Maybe you'll find that less misleading.

> GHG emissions come from fossil fuels extracted by these companies, even though the companies themselves aren't the ones using the fossil fuels nor producing the GHGs.

That's addressed in the report. Usage of their products makes up the majority of emissions, but it's not true that companies don't use the fuels or emit GHGs.

> Scope 3 emissions account for 90% of total company emissions and result from the downstream combustion of coal, oil, and gas for energy purposes.

Direct operational emissions (scope 1) are also taken into account. These "are attributed to the extraction and production of oil, gas, and coal."

> I fail to see how China Coal (top 1), Saudi Aramco (2nd), or Gazprom (3rd) could do anything about their process to significantly reduce the amount of emmisions from their products.

Oh, they can do plenty. From reducing their own operational emissions and optimizing the refinement of their products, to diversifying their business strategies to avoid these emissions in the first place. How about investing their vast resources into driving climate technology forward? These companies should be the first to invest in new technology, instead of startups having to claw their way into the market.

How about we stop the growth of coal production in developing countries? If China alone would avoid making the same mistakes the West did, it would have a huge impact.

But you're conveniently building a strawman that addresses only fossil fuel producing companies. Let's ignore these and focus on other industries. Are there no changes these companies can do to significantly reduce their emissions? I doubt that very much. Changing how these companies operate would have a far greater positive effect than what any tech startup, or group of individuals, can do.

> Other solutions from climate tech like better electricity production and storage needs to happen simultaneously, not after by "getting our priorities straight".

I never said that other solutions don't need to happen simultaneously. But it's clear that the brunt of the responsibility is on corporations and governments.

[1]: https://www.cdp.net/en/articles/media/new-report-shows-just-...

[2]: https://cdn.cdp.net/cdp-production/cms/reports/documents/000...

Yes and no. Sure, tech solutions are superficial and can only ever be partially successful. But we know how to build tech. We do not know how to manage 8 billion people stuffed into a couple of hundred unruly 'sovereign' nations. Certainly not to the extent necessary to hold back trivial desires created by corporations/marketing, which now form the core of most world cultures.

I have no idea whether or not it's possible to create a viable network of global human cultures which can constrain themselves to live as part of reality (what some call 'nature'), but I'm pretty sure if it is, it's no less than a century away. Probably longer. And we don't have that much time to stop fouling the nest.

I see climate change tech as a stopgap. Without it (BAU), or with fantasies of immediate revolutionary change, we're fucked. Tech might help keep society viable long enough to create what's really needed, in a century, or two, or three.

It's even worse than that, listen to the politicians and economists all parroting:

- the economy needs to be kicked into gear

- we need to inspire consumer confidence to spend more

- GDP growth over anything

- employment rate needs to be high

This is systematic need for spinning money by producing garbage and then using a lot of marketing-advertising to inspire people buying that garbage. Mostly so some people can skim off a bit and get ferraris.

It's all so stupid, a much more cooperative and equitable society would mean better life for everyone (including the would be billionaires who would not need to worry about the rabble attacking them and taking away their toys) along with less pressure to the environment.

I get we are genetically wired to survive at the harsh game of life, but we have also made profoundly uncool some things like murder, rape, etc.

We need to make "being rich" or "baller lifestyle" to be uncool. But we cant because a lot of marketing relies on this to sell their garbage.

Be that as it may, I think this initiative by YC is mainly because they noticed a lot of talented founders were starting Climate Tech companies. pg had a tweet about this a while ago.

> Tesla for home appliances: re-inventing home appliances (water heaters, induction stoves, clothes dryers, etc) to create better consumer experiences using specific advantages of electric technology.

> Tesla-like experience for home energy management: smart hub, including smart charging, load shifting, software-based load shedding for improved resiliency, and better circuit-level energy use measurement.

With how Tesla vehicles are rated, and the unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners, no way in hell am I do I want to "Teslify" everything in my home. In order to prove that there's something wrong with the current consumer experience, you have to bring an example to show it. So far, I've only seen ways to further add more surveillance and advertising into everyday people's lives, not to mention the increased disposability of appliances. No thanks.

Venture capitalists using Tesla in some kind of virtue signal is the most 2022 thing

Considering what a terrible year this has been for Tesla stock and their absentee CEO it would be more fitting in 2021.

The brand has enough baggage by now that the second-highest comment chain is about its unsuitability as an ideal, rather than discussing the content itself.

That was the point. It’s vey 2022 to gaslight us about how we’re experiencing these VC darlings.

The way I see it when talking about Tesla it’s talking about the pre/post Tesla (aka the transition from ICE to EV in all auto makers) and not the build quality of Tesla per se !

^ This. There is just a backlash on HN with Elon hurting so many people's feels about Twitter & having an alternate political view, that everyone is seeing him in a negative light.

Tesla helped push ICE to EV even though technologically some of the efforts may have been done at other companies and products before - yet Tesla pushed the experience mainstream.

Exactly, they are asking for technology that can shift their industry. They aren't asking for Tesla's baggage any more than a request for "Uber for X" implies they want a company that will ignore regulatory requirements.

I’m pretty sure that “Uber for X” implies some degree of ignoring regulations long enough to have power to change them.

Why not pre/post electric Lada of the 1980s and associated R&D?

https://www.reckontalk.com/electro-russian-tesla-first-elect...

The biggest manufacturer of electric cars worldwide is BYD

The biggest driver of sales (trough public policy) has been China and Europe, including things like announcing bans of ICE in city centers/cities:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Electric_car_use_by_country

Tesla started as a luxury brand (Roadster and then luxury sedans) and the only innovation they have managed is name recognition; even the adoption they have driven in the US has been mostly trough public policy like tax incentives.

Because very few people will know what you are talking about if you go up to a random person and ask them about Lada or BYD.

Musk is an egomaniacal idiot that most of us dislike. There are countless valid reasons to dislike Tesla as a company and the cars they make. However, that shouldn't cause people to overthink things when their name is simply being used as shorthand as it clearly is in this instance.

> Because very few people will know what you are talking about if you go up to a random person and ask them about Lada or BYD.

This is why parent said only innovation Tesla has managed is name recognition.

Tesla is indeed a strange choice for a simile, considering that Tesla cars use prodigious amounts of energy compared to other electric cars, or other cars in general. I doubt they're even more environmentally friendly overall than a compact combustion engine car. Tesla made electric cool by building an over the top luxury car, what we really need is the opposite.

There are some cars coming out next year that are more energy efficient than a Tesla, like the Hyundai Ioniq 6, but I don't know of any currently widely available vehicles that are.

By energy efficient do you mean kilowatt hours / kilometer (or equivalent units)? The standard range Model 3 – the most efficient one – is apparently 15/16 kWh per 100km, which is pretty much exactly the same as a VW ID3 (15.5 - 15.7 in Pro spec) and only a little less than a Hyundai Ioniq 5 (16.8).

Sitting on my hyundai kona ev. In 2833 kms, consumption was 13.5 kwh/100km

A tesla weighs 2-3 times more than a compact car, so that means it must be extremely efficient pound for pound. Nevertheless, I doubt many people, until recently, bought Tesla's because of (ostensible) environmental concerns.

How does your efficiency argument follow from merely weight?

If you can move a heavy object using less energy than others move a much lighter object, then it would seem that you are quite efficient. Unless we're talking about constant speed in a vacuum.

Yes, but where does the less energy argument or data come from?

From the comment I responded to

Every single Tesla owner I know bought it for environmental reasons.

I would be a great disaster if Tesla or HP produced water boilers. If would be success if Brother or raspberry pi made them.

The idea of "HP Instant Ink"-like subscriptions for home appliances is vomit inducing.

"Your boiler has reached the limit of water it can warm up this month. We're sending you a new one"

But think of the shareholder value they could accrue.

Honestly, I'm not very mad at instant ink because the printer market was so broken. A subscription for another appliance would be pretty maddening, though.

I have instant ink and I love it. First time ever I’ve been able to own a printer without swearing at it once

I came here to post this as well. For one, it doesn't even make sense. Tesla is a car manufacturer and makes objectively worse cars than the competition. They just happen to be EVs. Making any thing "Tesla" inside my house means it will be flashy but work less well than existing solutions, in addition to removing all knobs. All of which is the opposite of what I want. I've already de-smartified my Nests because, surprise, they aren't actually smart and end up being worse than me controlling them.

What is objectively worse about them? They seem very popular with consumers.

Popularity does not necessarily correlate with quality. Tesla is typically rated at the bottom for quality and reliability.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...

Note that that ranking only compares against other EVs, of which there aren't that many yet, and that Kia's new model, which has only been out for a year, is already above Tesla. I have said this for years, and it's been clear to me that Tesla cannot compete against traditional car makers moving into the EV space.

Consumer Reports ranks Tesla at either the bottom or second to last when compared against all other car manufacturers.

Tesla is pretty high on reliability, just not quality (ie. panel gaps and build quality issues are still a thing, but based on CR they're on-par with all the other non-luxury car brands).

They are rated low on both reliability and quality. Consumer Reports rates them second to last in reliability. And Tesla has for years done warranty work as "goodwill repairs" to hide how bad their reliability is.

For one, their interior is rather unluxurious considering the price tag relative to other EVs. The only thing it's got going for it is the tablet screen, which was cool back in the day but today anyone can install an aftermarket one in their old beater.

If someone wants to buy a Tesla because they truly like it or the brand, they're the only ones who can decide the right answer for them. I personally don't get it. There are way better options now in my eyes; it's just they're uncool brand names like Subaru and Hyundai.

The engineering tolerances are not good -- ie. you can stick a pen between the body panels. Can't do that with a Toyota or Honda, for example.

The interior is spartan. My $40,000 minivan has more interior features for passengers than a $140,000 Model X.

The tablet controls. They are unsafe as they make you take your eyes off the road. Cars still need physical buttons for critical control systems and systems that consumers need to control often (radio, climate control, windshield wipers, cruise control, etc.).

Build quality -- Tesla's are known for having cheap parts and parts that fall off or break easily or just wear out quickly.

I agree with pretty much all of this but if any governing body(whether it be the manufacturer or government) cared about screens and how detrimental they are to safety and driving, you wouldn't see every other person gawking at their phone while driving 70mph.

There's a reason using your phone while driving is illegal in most of the liberal states.

Jaywalking is also illegal in a lot of places, doesn't mean its enforced.

> Cars still need physical buttons for critical control systems and systems that consumers need to control often (radio, climate control, windshield wipers, cruise control, etc.).

Radio - volume and track control are physical, more technical stuff can be done by voice or simple touch screen touches. For folks who say “I don’t do voice, but I demand physical controls”, I humbly suggest that using voice is safer than anything physical in terms of maintaining focus on the road.

Climate control - voice or simple, easy-to-access touch controls.

Windshield wipers - physical or voice, voice or touch to adjust if necessary. “Auto” makes can make this a set it and forget it feature.

Cruise control - physical

> unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners

I'm an owner and I have a lot of confidence in autopilot. Generally, if it's possible to use autopilot on the road I'm on, I do. So that's one owner you're witnessing who's not part of that "unanimous".

Isn't the big problem with smart appliances exactly this?

I was in the market for a new pellet grill recently and I ran into huge problems, almost everything on the market is bluetooth this or wifi that. The last thing I need is an unreliable radio to be at the center of the controls for my outdoor appliance, or for any appliance whatsoever, to have a dependency on my internet connection and the availability of some manufacturers servers.

Because who know what might happen. The manufacturer might decide it doesn't like your hardware anymore and push out a firmware update that bricks all your devices in 60 days, but don't worry, they'll give you a coupon for buying the latest and greatest from them (looking at you sonos).

Want to know how to not get me to buy your product? Make it dependent on some unreliable technology that gives no benefit to the device, but makes the device dependent on the goodwill of the parent corporation.

What's amazing is the failed potential of these devices that do include things like Bluetooth and WiFi. In so many cases, they sporadically fail to pair with their respective apps, or are slow to pair, if they can reliably pair at all. Even when the connection works, you'd better hope the app actually alerts you when your food is ready or whatever. Whooops, our API returned a 500! Our bad, bruh!

I'm particularly baffled because, in my experience designing and manufacturing my own PCB with a BLE IC on it, integrating something like BLE and having it work reliably doesn't seem that difficult. BLE is an annoyingly complicated standard, but it's by no means impossible to work with. The app I wrote could pair with the device instantly and reliably stay connected while receiving data in real time. I don't get why other BLE devices I've owned have issues while my pissant attempt had none of them. If it's BLE, you can count on seeing some loading spinners frequently unless it's being paired with another devices designed specifically for it (like a game console).

The only wireless digital technologies I've found are beneficial are WiFi internet and Bluetooth audio (which is still awful in most cases but AirPods work OK). Everything else ends up being a gimmick, more of a hassle, and even a trojan horse for more privacy violations.

> unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners

You must talk to a very narrow band of Tesla owners.

Auto pilot is basically enhanced cruise control, and Tesla do this quite well.

If you’re referring to fulls self driving (FSD), then I agree. FSD is best seen as slightly advanced autopilot (it can change lanes, etc.) and self-parking in very tight spots like small garages. The FSD name is largely a misnomer, and it has given the features that have been implemented well (listed above) a very bad name.

Related to the request and your comment, I personally wish that home appliances would have Tesla-esque features, just without the Elon over-promising bluster.

The agriculture section is disheartening. What is the VCs worlds' obsession with cellular ag and mushrooms? Totally missing the forest for the trees here.

Global calorie supply is dependent on the Haber-Bosch process i.e. Nitrogen fixation.

The next big agricultural breakthrough will be some form of nitrogen fixation:

1. That is not affected by a reduction of fossil fuels

2. Is on par with Haber-Bosch in terms of elemental Nitrogen application

3. Does not require a massive shift in consumer preferences

Also, the food industry is heavily reliant on energy sources that are not easily replaced by renewables. It needs dense energy like diesel and natgas. So there's another topic that should be funded.

> Does not require a massive shift in consumer preferences

This is getting more and more irrelevant by the day. If “climate tech” fails to “fix” climate change (a goal which I believe to be impossible), then it’s not going to matter what people’s preferences are — the choices are going to be made for them and it won’t matter what they like/dislike.

Then ignore it, but rest still applies and requires innovation.

But keep in mind that if two companies provide N-fixing technology, and one of them doesn't require changes in consumer preference, then they will be the winner

The only way you will get change at scale before disaster is to help people keep their lifestyle.

Climate change is a fixable problem. It is not anywhere near the point that choices will be made for people in the next two to three decades.

Curbing climate change without curbing behavior and lifestyle are completely at odds with each other.

That is not the case. In the past we've made huge improvements to human efficiency in terms of resource usage and waste output. We still can and will. Unless we destroy the economy before we can develop the required technology.

You're confounding the people of today with the people of the future. We've learned over the last couple of decades that the people of today in general refuse to make any sacrifice for the people of the future. This doesn't change when the people of today are negatively affected because any sacrifice is felt in the future and doesn't mitigate the negative consequences of today.

Would you happen to have read “ministry for the future” by Kim Robinson ?

I just read the chapter where he elaborate on that exact idea.

I think it’s absolutely on point with our attitude as a society / specie

Will check it out thanks

> You're confounding the people of today with the people of the future.

This is is just alarmist talk that was made famous by the likes of the Effective Altruism guys.

“You kidding me? I love eating bacteria-modified-plastic-waste-paste. Have you tried the blue flavor yet?”

I would eat that. And I like food, real food, and cook from scratch most days.

Would hydrogen work as a fuel source here?

It would make sense for heavy machinery to use hydrogen rather than batteries as an energy store because it is a lot more energy dense (and lighter), but it's still not as energy dense as fossil fuels.

And it's assuming that you have enough cheap energy to produce enough hydrogen in the long term. Which probably won't happen.

Projects to run the Haber-Bosch process with clean hydrogen are already underway:

https://www.bicmagazine.com/projects-expansions/renewable-su...

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/08/26/avaada-to-invest-5-bi...

https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/egypt-...

They use electricity from wind and/or solar power to electrolyze hydrogen from water. Then the hydrogen gets combined with nitrogen in the Haber-Bosch process like usual. This is not a good bet for VCs because the capital commitments are large (billions of dollars' worth of physical chemical plant) and there's no prospect of winning the market by being early. Big industrial players are already earlier than VCs could hope to be at this stage.

In some ways this is a trip back in time. In the 20th century, many renewable ammonia plants were constructed and operated using hydroelectric power:

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4079/3/2/11/htm

It peaked in the 1960s (figure 6). A combination of rising demand for electricity at home and industry, plus optimization of hydrogen production from fossil feedstocks, made electricity-to-hydrogen (and from there to ammonia) less popular. But now rising natural gas prices and climate concerns, plus falling costs for renewable electricity from wind and solar, make it attractive again.

worked on control & modelling software for some of these PtX plants. Pretty neat stuff, although I got the impression there are quite a few already running

The missing thing: international incentive structures.

Today, most things are done the most economical way. And that might involve emitting carbon.

A country which regulates the emissions of carbon will end up producing goods and services using carbon free methods - but those methods will often be less economically efficient than the carbon producing method, even at scale.

So any country that goes all in on the carbon-free world will end up economically worse off -- it's goods won't be competitive in the global marketplace. A government cannot subsidize itself to competitiveness in all markets.

Solve that problem, and the world will decarbonize itself almost overnight.

You might be interested in the EUs new carbon border adjustment tax.

https://www.ft.com/content/51e6bd85-dbb2-4071-b635-8ab9bd2ab...

It appears that all solutions to this problem require one of:

* All countries to agree on an incentive scheme (unlikely - although big trading blocs like EU/China/Russia/USA might be able to bully the rest of the world into it with the threat of sanctions if they do not agree)

* Some countries to agree on a scheme, and to break WTO rules to penalize (carbon tax) imports and subsidize exports to/from those who do not.

Or... the world continues on the current trajectory of decarbonizing highly visible things only (Electric cars, solar panels on the roof!) to appease voters while avoiding decarbonizing anything that much affects nationwide competitiveness (eg. steel/fertilizer production).

YC can’t solve that. I agree it’s an important cause, but it’s really hard coordination problem. If we can make progress without, just by using tech to lower emissions, that’s a clear win.

Having said that, a CO2 tax just makes the financial incentives for change better; someone still needs to build the better system after funds are reallocated. So if you already started a cost-reduction startup, you’ll have first-mover advantage when the CO2 taxes come into play.

> So any country that goes all in on the carbon-free world will end up economically worse off -- it's goods won't be competitive in the global marketplace. A government cannot subsidize itself to competitiveness in all markets.

Isn't this just the tragedy of the commons writ large?

It makes no sense for anyone really to make personal sacrifices for the planet. Why should I stay at home riding my pushbike to the artisan markets when my neighbour will gleefully fly to Hawaii for his holidays, undoing in a few days whatever carbon reductions I've achieved in a year?

The logical course is to accept that your actions mean nothing and live a greedy life, amassing wealth at the cost of the planet's health and hoarding it for when things get bad, whether that's this generation or the next.

Here are some of my unsolicited and harebrained climate startup ideas. I’m poor and I can’t afford to pursue any of these but I believe a carbon-neutral future will require these things:

* Cheap EV chargers for people who don’t own houses. Young people are the most likely to be open to EVs, but they’re also the least likely to own a house. Charging is a major barrier to entry. Create something so cheap and ubiquitous that charging is not a concern. For example chargers built into lamp posts.

* Figure out UHVDC to enable clean energy surpluses to be sold internationally. Reliable UHVDC networks will allow clean energy projects to service more geographic area, making them more competitive. Eventually, storage might not even be necessary, since dark/non-windy regions can always pull from regions with wind or sun. And when fusion power comes online in a few decades, huge energy surpluses will be very profitable.

* Passive carbon capture via nuclear barges. We’ve had nuclear reactors in the water for decades, let’s put them to use capturing carbon.

* Floatovoltaics. Land isn’t always cheap. Put solar panels in other places. There are other positive side effects as well, such as reducing algae blooms and reducing evaporation.

For passive carbon capture, I don’t understand what you’re proposing. Let’s pretend: Joe Biden gives you a nuclear aircraft carrier and a team of nuclear engineers. Now what?

Sorry, “passive” is confusing here. It’s not actually passive at all. I mean to use nuclear power for Direct Air Capture:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture

DAC requires large fans to move air over a chemical filter. You need to power those fans with something that doesn’t release CO2.

But then where are you putting the CO2?

Terrestrial DAC usually pumps it in to some geological formation.

Passive carbon capture - https://inplanet.earth/

> * Cheap EV chargers for people who don’t own houses.

https://www.itselectric.us

Yep. Also, I moved from France 7 years ago. Last year I went back for vacation and rented a EV on a whim.

I thought about charger after the fact.

Well; in those 7 year the territory got covered in chargers. Private / public mix. Some will likely disappear once things settle a bit but damn, I was surprised

https://www.dockcharged.com is another one people should check out.

Floatavoltaics - https://solarduck.tech/

Lately i've been thinking that right now may be a great time to start an oil company. Cost of solar is going down so capturing c02 and turning it into fuel is looking like a viable option. People would pay a premiun for carbon neutral fuel. Most climate companies, focused on carbon capture, tried to make the most efficient carbon capture possible, but what if one focused on scalability and reducing manufacturing costs instead? A device that loses 90%+ of the energy when converting sun to fuel, would be viable if the cost of the machine would just be low enough, and scaled up enough. Such a device would in theory have a near 0 cost of operation once installed, so with a long enough life span it would be profitable.

https://www.twelve.co is doing this (with fuels as well as other carbon-derived chemicals). Trouble is, this is carbon recycling, not carbon sequestering. It's better than the status quo, but I'm more excited about ideas that either sequester GHGs permanently or replace industrial GHG-generating processes permanently.

The first step is to reduce emissions, then stop them all together and finally sequester them to return to pre-climate-change level. I'd welcome all solutions along that spectrum.

There's no fundamental difference between burning a synthetic fuel or burning a fossel fuel and sequestering the resulting carbon. Both are zero-carbon.

Yes, sequestration can go negative-carbon, but that doesn't help anybody who has a difficult to replace fuel burning process.

Storing liquids (or solids) from at STP is far simpler than storing it in gaseous form. If we can cheaply extract CO2 or methane from the atmosphere and make liquid from it, we could sequester it in all sorts of trivial ways.

Sure, but that's not what Twelve is doing or what the "I should start an oil company" comment suggested. They're talking about extracting CO2 to make fuel, and then burning it again in the same petroleum-based economy.

Yeah sure. And that ties into all our existing infrastructure, which seems fair.

If we can extract and burn and extract and burn and keep going with that loop (without dinosaur input), then all that extract-burn cycle is zero-carbon.

We can then separately decide to pump some of that cycle’s output into easy liquid storage, thus going carbon-negative.

I think you're on to something, it makes me curious what the energy expenditure of one of these operations is in a conventional deployment, then what it would be over time with solar being the producer of energy.

Electro-fuels currently cost about $15 per gallon - In case anyone else was curious.

https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/fuels-us-euro...

Thanks for the link! $15 is a reasonable price where a company hyper focused on lowering the cost of manufacturing of C02 extraction machines, could become very competative withing a reasonable timeframe.

It kind of floored me when I first heard it. Tripling the cost of jet fuel would be bad, but not that bad. And that number is likely to fall.

This is the play that Terraform Industries is engaging in as well. Cost for synthesizing a unit of methane from atmospheric CO2 and water using solar power is set to drop lower than the cost of drilling it out of the ground.

https://terraformindustries.com/

According to their December newsletter, they project that point will occur in 2027 without subsidies and 2024 with the subsidies provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.

> lower than the cost of drilling it out of the ground.

Shipping is a huge component of the price of natural gas. So it'll be a long time before they're cheaper than the price of natural gas in Alberta or Siberia, but they'll be able to beat the price in Los Angeles a lot sooner.

That’s a good point, local production cuts out the cost of transportation

>Low or zero emissions concrete

Feels like there's already options there.

https://cen.acs.org/materials/Chemex-goes-global-carbon-neut...

Although I'm betting it's better to just radically cut demand rather than try to invent a really good carbon-neutral/negative concrete. If we could sink a whole bunch of carbon into concrete though (significant carbon capture -> magic? -> concrete), that would be cool though.

That's a really uncomfortable fact with a lot of climate issues: it's way better to just not do the thing instead of trying to find a neutral/net-negative carbon process for the thing.

Making the world cut demand for concrete might actually sound dramatically harder than making zero-emission concrete. (and both are extremely hard!)

Ironically, wood is starting to look like a very promising building material for tall structures that is comparatively green.

Some thoughts:

1. We know for a fact that mangroves can mitigate tsunami damage. I've been looking into this and a lot of tree-planting programs really suck and are basically failures. Additionally mangroves are tropical plants and -- so far -- I am failing to find an alternative for colder climates.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051028141252.h...

2. We certainly need energy solutions and I'm happy to see people work on that, but we could use more companies working on passive solar solutions as well. Most passive solar solutions are best implemented from the get go (from breaking ground on a new building), but some can be added after the fact. There is likely lots of low-hanging fruit in that second category.

3. Middle-eastern countries and their architectural traditions have many practices that help mitigate heat levels inside buildings and even at street level. These seem to be largely unknown outside such countries and we are missing a huge opportunity to export or adapt such traditions to other places to try to adapt to hotter temps.

Kelp is an alternative for the north. Unfortunately it's been disappearing because of warming oceans.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

re: mangrove forests, there's a company I'm following that is working on replanting them as part of a permaculture solution: https://regenerativeresources.co/

We plan to remove 4 Gt of atmospheric methane but the YC terms are too high for us. We're just funding it the old fashioned way.

This sounds amazing! Could you share more info about your startup?

You can read more at www.bluedotchange.com

4 Gt is roughly all the anthropogenic CH4, responsible for about a third (or possibly a half) of temperature rise. After that we will continue at a lower level in order to keep curating the level and as a precaution against methane bursts.

4 Gt of CH4 is considered roughly equivalent to 120 Gt of CO2

Fascinating - saving the planet by adding iron chloride to the mix of pollutants emitted by diesel-powered tanker ships in order to convert methane into CO2. I can't imagine many more ways in which the approach could be unintuitive, but if it works and the side effects are thoroughly understood, I appreciate the pragmatism!

Ah, the ISA approach. I could never calibrate the fringy-ness of that idea.

Do you have evidence that it works in-situ, or any ideas of how to test this in an observable way? If so, there are folks interested.

It is demonstrated in the lab and we are developing a way to assay what’s going on in the open air. Lot of interesting work in this area.

Do you have papers/whitepapers you can share (privately or otherwise)?

(I run a climate engineering group to help accelerate mitigation/removal methods.)

Click on the menu item at the top of the page marked “Science”. All the rest is for the lay audience.

Can you say more about your group?

Funny that after so many years of funding and encouraging crypto mining the VC industry now decides to go "green".

With 800 billion dollars of funding from the government, there are going to be a lot of opportunities to follow the cash.

Yeah, this is not VC "going green" for ethical reasons, this is VC investing in the next tech wave, which luckily is climate tech.

Those generative AI companies aren't exactly lean on energy usage either. It's about capturing the IRA money, which to their credit they are very up front about. Maybe something good will come out of it, after all, that's the point of the government spending! If they save the world purely out of self interest then we still get the saved world...

And what about when they take the government money and start doing innovative work, then once the funding dries up they realize that bitcoin mining is more profitable after all and promptly switch back to that. That's the problem with putting public good in the hands of private entities who have their next quarterly report to worry about and not much else.

What's odd about that? Capitalism, of which VC is the pointy end, is unapologetically nihilistic.

Attempting to solve climate change with virtue-signalling consumption and production is worse than useless. That doesn't mean such things are necessarily bad startup ideas, though, but few things turn me off more than this sort of thing.

No one that has an interest in making profit will ever tell someone to stop consuming.

I am 10+ years in the Climate arena and it surprises me that most innovations ignore human behaviour: I see a gap.

I see two folk types here: the Climate scientist and the carbon life cycle Analyst.

How come social sciences (I am in particular hinting at behavioral research) have not been found yet a source of value?

I had the same thought. I’m in energy infra design so I care mainly about tech that helps me implement renewables easier.

For consumers, simple tools to help them make green decisions would be useful (LCA as you mentioned). Im interested, what kind of behavioural research applications do you mean?

I imagine being able to create new behavioural trends linked to emerging business value.

I read serious PR literature and see parallels with the emerging literature on social tipping dynamics.

How could this social dynamics be materialised? How to steer them while creating value?

For consumer purchases of disposable goods you can use a browser plugin like choosefinch.com/ (disclaimer - I work here).

Thanks for the suggestion! Out of interest, do you know if there are any plans to make the impact predictions user-specific? E.g I live in a very isolated city, so transport considerations dictate for some products.

We're very, very early and this is valuable feedback, thanks!

We do indeed have some plans for personalization.

My goal is to make it painfully easy to live in communities where you can walk, bike, or take public transport to all of your daily needs, which is a completely low tech problem with a huge social science component.

The first step, I think, is making it obvious when purchasing a home whether you will be able to do this yourself.

Want to collaborate? I have a pilot project going for Ireland and am unsure where to take it - www.gaffologist.com (it's buggy AF but it got me my own home!)

This could be an idea: to expand this work and map neighbourhoods according to their "affordances" aka opportunities for a sustainable or climate friendly living. I'd love to engage myself on something like this, I will drop an email after hols, keep it strong!

Thanks! Would love to do same but no contact info in your bio.

what is "painfully easy"?

You know, that's a good point. I suppose I mean "painfully obvious". Like, so easy/obvious to figure out where to live that it's the easiest choice, not something you have to spend ages trying to tease out from existing tools.

Really, the big win is going to be "efficient air conditioning for poor countries" and "using materials other than concrete to build."

Everyone loves AC. The more money you have the more you use it.

And everyone in poor countries uses concrete to build.

The bad thing is that these two things combine: the concrete box that is your building heats up like a brick oven, making AC work more. Doh!

Air conditioners are already pretty efficient, so you're not going to get huge wins there.

But solar-powered air conditioning could be a huge win. You can avoid the DC-AC-DC conversion losses, and avoid any impact on the grid. Most people without air conditioning would be quite happy with air conditioning that only works while the sun is shining.

You can add a bit of insulation inside the concrete to make the house require less cooling than (any?) wooden house.

Concrete insulates quite well by itself. I don't understand the GP's complaint. It can be improved, and there are several improved alternatives on the market since basically forever, but it's not bad by itself, and it's certainly better than wood.

(I really thought it would be about concrete CO2 emissions at first.)

I'm going to throw this out there: most of the promising companies in this space are likely going to get their seed funding from federal grants rather than incubators like YC. You may not be seeing deal flow because your product is unattractive to them in comparison.

This may have been true a few years ago but climate tech is very trendy among investors right now, and every VC is going to want their piece.

https://www.svb.com/industry-insights/clean-tech-sustainabil...

Whether they want their piece and whether the companies want to give it to them are two different stories. I expect that series A/B investors with $5 million to throw in at a $25 million valuation are getting a lot of deal flow here, since that's larger than a grant will reasonably get you. The seed stage is where an appropriately-sized chunk of government money is still readily available, especially if you are a spin-off of a well-known research group. This realistically means that in things like battery technology and carbon capture, YC and other seed funds will get the dregs.

I mean heat pump water heaters already exist [346] and they're reasonable in most everywhere (they put extra load on the furnace in cold climates in the winter but can still be a win overall). The main advance here might be more "smart integration" with the grid, but that is going to have to be a national level thing.

[346] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-pump-water-heaters

>water heaters

Are we being serious? I have an electric water heater. I have an induction cooktop, which is electric by necessity. I have an electric clothes dryer. (Is there even a consumer-grade gas-fired clothes dryer on the market?) The consumer experience is fine. I turn on the hot water tap and hot water comes out. What am I missing?

The only thing I can think of is a water heater that knows when power is cheap and preheats water hotter than it needs to be so it's available when you need it without using power ... I guess?

This is becoming quite common in Finland (thanks to insanely high spot prices of electricity). Shelly is usually used to do the automation. Note that the water is not heated "hotter than necessary" but rather water is heated up to the max amount when the price is cheap.

Traditionally water heaters were only on at night.

Yeah the "max amount" can vary - I have mine set higher than "you should" to prevent Legionnaires' disease and then have a mixer that reduces the temperature back to safe for the house.

https://www.amazon.com/Cash-Acme-Thermostatic-Temperature-Ap...

That's a very low tech solution that could take some advantage, and thermal mass of water is pretty high, especially if the tank is well insulated.

This has started in California in the form of a utility pilot that controls heat pump electric water heaters. I know because I'm a participant in the pilot.

The opportunity to reduce carbon emissions is pretty massive when done at scale, because water heating accounts for 25% of home energy use in California.

In general, there is a big rush of companies, both startups and established, into the DER space right now, I suspect because of both the relatively low cost of entry and the high value of the grid services (frequency regulation, peak load avoidance) they are usually bidding on.

You mean you don't want to download an app to your phone that steals your data so you can....adjust the temperature setting of your hot water heater?

If you're heating hot water you already have a problem ;) (I know, I know).

One existing water heater innovation:

https://www.mixergy.co.uk/products/mixergy-tank/

Has both stupid innovation (Alexa integration) and sensible (working with the grid to balance demand, innovative design that saves energy and heats up faster when you need it quickly)

Efficiency by heat pump

You just need a spot market for electricity and then you can program the water heater to follow the spot price (or rather avoid heating when it's expensive).

This is available already in a few heat pump water heaters in Finland.

> These startups offer commercial solutions to decarbonize society or remove carbon from the atmosphere. By doing this at speed and scale, we have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. The financial opportunity of doing so is massive: an estimated $3-10 trillion in EBITDA will be up for grabs. As one example, Tesla has pushed the car industry to go electric while making $75B in annual revenue at a 60% annual growth rate.

I didn't go further than that. They prove in one paragraph that they haven't understood the climate problem at all.

Then I’d be interested if you can explain the problem.

Do people really believe we can innovate our way through climate change?

Yes, in fact I think we probably already have.

There's still some politicss to overcome, but if the cheapest source of energy is low carbon then the problem is mostly solved in the big picture. As long as we don't hit too many tipping points we should be okay.

You're making pretty extraordinary claims here.

While low carbon electricity might be the cheapest source of energy on spot markets, that's a really tiny part of the picture. We still need to figure out large scale storage and electrify everything, those aren't solved problems.

But let's assume we solve them. Do we have enough metallic resources on Earth that we can extract cheaply? Do we have enough cheap fossil fuels left to actually do that?

Historically there's no energy transition:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

New sources of energy have made the world consume more of the old ones, not less. Same thing with technological innovation and gains in energy efficiency.

Are you suggesting there is a solution without innovation, or that there is no solution at all?

Public policy >> tech solutions. You might get a few people to replace their water heaters if you come up with one more efficient, but that's nothing compared to federally funded nuclear plants.

Innovation in nuclear has made it politically viable in the first place. If we still had to use 1970s nuclear tech it would be a hard sell.

In any case, I’m always skeptical of “we can’t do X without doing Y” arguments because they’re usually about making the perfect the enemy of the good rather than X actually being precluded by not having Y.

> Public policy >> tech solutions

You can't heat your home with public policy

You can if you print them out first.

The real question is did we start too late to curb climate change? We'll innovate to mitigate its damages either way.

Do people really believe the climate was ever going to stop changing?

Interesting position. Are you suggesting that the solution will not involve innovation, or that climate change is unsolvable?

As an employee at a climate tech company, I think the primary roadblock is simply investing resources (money and time) in the various solutions available to us. A ton of innovation is happening along the way (e.g. first ever net positive fusion ignition yesterday) but even without much innovation, we could solve the problems by directing our resources at them.

In other words, I think climate change is very solvable and that innovation along the way is constant and inevitable. I'm not saying that we will definitely make the necessary investments to succeed, which I think might be your point? But as this post demonstrates, the rate of investment is improving significantly.

Yes. And even if it's not certain, it has a much greater chance of success than trying to impose worldwide consumption limits.

The gap here might be on combining social innovation with tech, which alone will not succeed.

> In the not-too-distant future, vehicles will charge when excess solar is available

Emporia Energy's smart EV charger can already do this. So can our $9 smart plug. Disclosure: I work there.

Big fan of your products :) Have bought a dozen of them personally.

From what I understand, excess solar is more common in markets that have asymmetric import/export prices, like Australia, that strongly incentivize self-consumption vs. exporting back to the grid. CA is likely to implement this with NEM 3.0 so we are likely to start seeing this shift in behavior in the US soon as well. Right now there isn't much of an economic incentive to do excess solar in markets with symmetric NEM compensation (I'm sure you know all of this).

Other problem we have in the US vs. AU is our cost of installation is so high that it makes oversizing systems somewhat cost prohibitive, which is what you'd need to do to get enough excess solar to charge an EV.

Third problem is where cars are parked during the day while the sun is shining, which may be tough for people who commute to work. Energy storage can obviously help here somewhat.

Right now, I feel like a kid in a candy store. These comment threads are a gold mine. I will be approaching many of you to learn and get to know you. I hope that that is fine. To let you know beforehand that I'm not spamming, I would like to tell you that I will be sending emails from either brajeshwar@oinam.com or brajeshwar@valinor.earth

Since 2018, I have been learning and experimenting with Climate-related activities along with Climate Scientists. The notable ones include building an aeroponics farm inside Bangalore city and delivering rare herbs to a few known cookhouses (YC interviewed and rejected us on this). The other, where I missed most of the involvement but a few, was a prototypical installation of a Vanadium Redox Battery.

In 2022, I went all in, and our team figured that most folks (individuals and companies) outside of the ones involved in Climate just want to get things done and don't know what to do about it. We also realize that to be commercially viable while fighting climate change; we need to get involved end-to-end. We started with data and the sexy tech, but we don't even mention that now when talking to potential customers.

Some well-known and "successful" climate-tech companies have already started on that path -- building an end-to-end channel -- then sell, up-sell, and side-sell their services, tools, and solutions. Think of how Microsoft owns the channel and introducing a new product is just showing up.

We are still very early and have a lot to learn, and act/do. My best wishes and luck to all those doing one or the other thing toward fighting Climate Change.

YC was very early to climatetech with a RFS for water back in 2017.

https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/request-for-startups-water/

Most people don't equate watertech with climatetech, but climate change is primarily a water crisis—flood & drought—and we need more entrepreneurs in watertech.

If you are building something in watertech, ping me, I'm happy to help.

> By doing this at speed and scale, we have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

I get out from this that the days when one could have had a non-Apocalyptic climate change discussion on this forum are now gone for good. Just saying: "we're doing this for the money, because that's where all the money is now going" would have been better, but whatever it works to keep this forum up and ad-free.

The list feels like "this is everything you can try" rather than "this is everything you should try".

Some of these are "let's take an unrelated industry and try to cram climate into its story", others are ideas that are doomed to fail. And the "if only forests existed forever they would be a better carbon sink" argument is so flawed I am disappointed to see it at all.

But, also a lot of good projects to work on in there.

Which ideas are doomed to fail? I would love to hear your feedback

I'd rather not give a thorough list, for obvious reasons. I will note one example, they note "Long-haul aviation does not currently have a generally accepted path to electrification", but include it on the list anyway.

YC's business model is to invest in "everything you can try." I don't think this intended to be a list of opportunities that YC believes are 100% likely to succeed; it's intended to be a list that probably includes one or more ideas that will succeed.

Probably the biggest environmental win would be to make arcologies: ecologically integrated cities.

> Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology",[2] is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated and ecologically low-impact human habitats.

> The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who believed that a completed arcology would provide space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities while minimizing individual human environmental impact. These structures have been largely hypothetical, as no arcology, even one envisioned by Soleri himself, has yet been built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

You would include the "Living Machines" designed-ecosystem technology of John Todd, et. al. to process waste and produce food and (some) medicines on site.

https://www.toddecological.com/

I dunno if you could make a startup out of it though.

Climate tech doesn't have to be crazy futuristic ML models or whatever in order to be useful.

For instance, I love the Purple Air air quality sensors, which crowdsource data and use a simple existing technology. (See https://map.purpleair.com/). This example may not be "revolutionary" enough for YCombinator, but I'm a fan.

Personally, I'd like to see a company that focuses on solar hot water heating. Water heating is usually about 1/3 of a home's energy usage. In several countries, especially in the middle east and in Africa, standalone solar hot water systems are the most common way water is heated. But in the US, solar hot water is nearly non-existent. I'm not talking whole-house solar panels, but rather a small system that you can buy for $~4-5k. There's an opportunity lurking there somewhere.

> Problems & Ideas: > Home pre-wiring

Ductwork for cables?

The problem unsolved in practice is post-wiring. A neat device would be a robotic remote controlled drill that can work itself through brick walls vertically from floor to floor (including steel-reinforced concrete ceilings) and in curves if needed.

Hugely expensive toy, but creating no dirt, compared to classic methods of adding more wires.

Curious, anyone working on automation in the mining space? I'm interested in jamming out with people about doing work in the industry. Or using airships in places like africa to transport minerals from mines to regional hubs (e.g. to avoid the huge delays on roadways currently happening between DRC and Zambia).

This company is working on hydrogen powered ultra-class trucks: https://firstmode.com/

I'm interested in this space and other mining-adjacent industries in the DRC-Zambia copper belt region due to the potential of this region to be a key player in central Africa's development and the world's move into electric vehicles.

The main challenge is getting capital.

Let's get in touch!

Anyone wants to kick around ideas? Particularly interested in use cases for technology to improve regenerative agriculture / permaculture operations and water management in the global South (esp. India). You can find my E-mail address in my profile.

Are high-margin luxury products really going to decarbonize the world? It seems pretty rare for companies that start on that path to move downmarket, but isn't that what we need to fight climate change?

a few ideas, in no particular order

- stop burning fossil fuels to the altar of the crypto crazy

- stop burning enormous amounts of fossil fuel to produce AI models that poorly replicate human skills, without asking if someone wanted it

- support power efficient devices or appliances. I despise Apple, for a lot of reasons, but the M series is a big step in the right direction.

- don't buy Teslas, buy small cars that occupy a small parking space, if you live in a city. Better yet, don't buy a car, car companies will die eventually, better sooner than later, so we can make them a thing of the past like we did with horsecars. All of us would feel dumb riding or buying one of those nowadays, right?

- support companies that actually do what they say, "90% recycled material" or "90% carbon neutral" is a brand, it's green washing, it's almost never true for large corporations. It will take the aforementioned Apple at least another 20 years to become really green, as in CO2 neutral and as of their actions had no terrible consequences on real people, in the real World.

- The only ADV I was able to endure in the past 20 years was "buy better, wear for longer" by Levis. Which is actually a very good thing to do for the environment and for ourselves as humans. Fast fashion is stupid.

- don't buy a new car ever again, just fix your old one.

good one!

there's a bit of regulatory problems in Europe[1] about that, cars need to adhere to certain emission standards to circulate in large areas of big cities, but definitely fix before buying is the old way that becomes new again.

In this light the right to repair is very important.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards

It's a little disappointing not to see investments in regenerative agriculture. Granted, most of the work here isn't in software but in actually...farming...but still, the more energy put in that space, the more we'll see it be used as a standard for how we get our food.

There are lots of things involved in the regen ag sector they should be looking at.

I'm looking for work in this space. 4 years of experience as a DS at a 1m customer electric utility, extensive experience with meter usage data, ML, data pipelines. Traditional background as mechanical engineer so I know physics and stuff.

> Tarpit Ideas

> Carbon removal credits on the blockchain. Using blockchain technology to solve the double-counting of carbon credits is an attractive idea but in our experience it’s just a technology choice and a small piece of the product you ultimately have to build.

I can't believe how often I hear this reasoning from people: Carbon credits have a double-counting problem? Blockchains prevent "double-spend"! Perfect solution! But as the quote points out, double-counting of carbon credits is not a software problem.

At Jasmine, we're tokenizing climate assets but not to prevent "double-spend." https://medium.com/jasmine-energy/why-is-jasmine-building-on...

I read the linked article and I could not make any sense of it.

I'm eager to help anyone working in this area, especially if you're needing help with the most green cloud infrastructure: Google Cloud. Miles at SADA.com

Private interests have gotten us into this mess, to think that the same can get us out of it is wishful thinking of the highest order.

Better to make mistakes of ambition than of sloth.

Not advocating nothing.

Just don't give monopolies to private interests, it's killing us.

What are the opportunities for deep CS research applied to climate? E.g., compilers, databases, program synthesis, and LLMs?

Computer vision for satellite imagery. LLMs might be good for harassing oil companies.

All this is relatively pointless (save "potentially profitable") without removing fossil fuels from general usage.

The best way to remove fossils fuels from general usage is to make electric options cheaper/better that fuel options.

Make liquid O2 or Methane 5% cheaper and/or 15% cleaner and you can sell it to SpaceX all day long.

I'm not convinced that the solutions to climate change are tech related. If anything, climate change is tech driven.

Addressing climate change doesn't really require startups and venture capitalist pump and dump schemes. It requires social and behavioral changes, mainly centered around consumption. Basically everything on this list would increase consumption, manufacturing, construction, road building, etc.

There are many, many known solutions to climate change that do not require any new science or technology. We just don't want to do them. Lists like these are really just trying to invent new tech and science that allows us to keep current levels of consumption.

> It requires social and behavioral changes, mainly centered around consumption.

So far it seems these changes are going to be impossible to achieve. Like you say we just don't want to do them. Current levels of consumption will continue, and increase.

So given that as a prior what are how do you approach the problem? If we can't change human behaviour can we innovate our way out of the problem?

I think that's part of my larger point that companies and startups simply cannot solve this problem and are really part of the problem. Governments could mandate and incentivize changes, but companies would come kicking and screaming.

> If we can't change human behaviour can we innovate our way out of the problem?

Most human innovations have increased climate change. I have little optimism that we can suddenly adjust the dial. And capitalism is simply at odds with reducing or even moderating consumption.

If you ever want to stop wallowing in misanthropic nihilism, I recommend reading books like "More From Less" - Mcafee which shows that capitalism does in fact reduce/moderate consumption. Next look at "Speed and Scale" - Doerr, or "How to Solve a Climate Disaster" - Gates for a giant list of human innovations that will in fact decrease/reverse climate change.

Aside from the needless labeling, thank you for the references. I will take a look. However, count me initially skeptical of some of the claims. I simply have not seen any data that would corroborate what seems to be the thesis of More From Less. Even if "more from less" is true, doing so at scale is still more. But I will read more. I do note the following quote from a review of More From Less:

> In a positive note, the author is very clear that market fundamentalism - letting capitalism run amok - is emphatically NOT an answer to the environmental crises, and that we need a strong state to regulate and control the private interests, repair market failures and price the externalities. ... That said, I've already noticed that many proponents of this book haven't noticed these caveats, and instead claim that McAfee suggests unbridled capitalism is "the" answer.

And to be clear, I am not opposed to environmentalism and acting on climate change. In fact it's quite the opposite. I do what I can with composting, recycling, native plant restoration and conservation on my property, and my donations. However, I am indeed quite cynical when VCs suddenly want to ride the green wave, and I don't see much of a coherent plan in the post here aside from a shotgun approach to simply making money through investments of a "hot" area.

Population growth is slowing.

Current projects suggest it will peak/plateau around 10 billion.

In many developed capitalist economies carbon footprint per person is decreasing.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

Theoretically, if we can drive the carbon footprint per captia down far enough such that the carbon footprint of 10 billion people is lower than the rate of carbon removal (natural and artifical), then we're fine.

Definitely a hard problem, but so is restructuring society into a non-capitalist, non-consumption based system.

So I think the "coherent plan" is to accelerate this decrease in carbon per captia. It's trending the right way but too slowly. But perhaps with the power of the market's exponential growth, if we incentivize it the right way, it will accelerate this in a way to avoid total collapse.

> If anything, climate change is tech driven.

It's sad to see such comments systematically downvoted on HN. I understand most people on here (including me) are paid to believe otherwise but you should really look at the history of tech and energy for the past 200 years or so, and also listen to competent people (i.e. not Musk nor PG) about the energy and geological resources challenges we're facing. Even if you don't care about climate change at all.

Thanks for the backup. Haha. But such is life in a technocratic society and on a technocratic forum.

Wait, what's the point submitting 2022 call?

Hybrid water heaters, active anode rods, and adaptive timing seem very revolutionary already. The other revolutionary aspect would be smaller point of use instant heaters that the world except the US use.

Tldr; a lot of existing innovation exists that the US isn't purchasing.

I'm confused, I searched for both "crypto" and "web3" on that page and there are no results?

Hopefully YC stops investing in those companies to help the environment

Then may I ask why you're shoehorning it into the conversation in such an unsubstantial way? Seems more like a cheap jab than a worthwhile opinion.

Well, if YC is positioning themselves as "helping to solve the problem" I think it's completely valid to call them out for previously "helping to create the problem", in a humorous way.

Because YC and other VC shops wouldn't shut the fuck up about crypto, web3, and blockchain across 2020-2021 and that sort of behavior doesn't get a free pass. Now they've moved onto Generative AI.

I'm sure they've learned their lesson, thanks to your cutting insights.

There is a bit under "Tarpit ideas":

"Carbon removal credits on the blockchain. Using blockchain technology to solve the double-counting of carbon credits is an attractive idea but in our experience it’s just a technology choice and a small piece of the product you ultimately have to build."

YC has generated enough wealth from these and other endless consumption ideas for a thousand lifetimes. The billionaire's playbook now dictates you focus on building your legacy by using disruptive technology to save the world.

I guess "Request for Startups: Climate Tech " is easier to stomach than "Help us perpetuate idiotic mythology, and convince the world PLANT FOOD (CO2, which is 0.008% of our atmosphere, of which we only produce 0.004% OF that 0.008%) is somehow 'bad' so we can push communist policies" isn't it?

We'll make a site that says "Hur Durr! Duh globul warming" is you give us... Oh , I don't know... 25 million bucks! Deal?

Twitter: explaining through power of free speech why climate change is a fraud.

The best green startup investment: select very productive engineers, and pay them to stop producing. Maybe they can learn an instrument, or take care of their garden. The less they produce, the better for the planet.

Of course that's not what a VC wants. But a VC doesn't really want ecology either, they want money. Pretending to be green just happens to be a profitable strategy.

The only thing that would move the needle on a massive societal level is reliable nuclear energy in every city and country. But is that too hard for startups to tackle? Or it doesn’t fit the narrative? Every other climate “tech” just nibbles at the margins if that even. And the byproduct of mass nuclear energy adoption would be that the issue is solved and there would be no more climate mongering amongst the conference crowd. They would have to find another “the sky is falling down” cause. That would also lead to less justifications for war from the war crowd if all the world had true energy security. Maybe that’s why?

Reminds me of this previous initiative:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence

Why do people keep spouting this nonsense? Yes there is a place for nuclear in the mix, but renewables have already moved the dial in a lot if countries. I the uk about 40% of our energy is from renewables, mostly wind at 25% and biomass for much of the rest. Or does that not fit your narrative? Or do you not consider that moving the needle? It's a damn sight easier, quicker and cheaper to put up wind turbines and solar panels than it is to build new nuclear reactors as well

The core issue is that they are unreliable when there is no wind or sunlight. Storage at scale is still not affordable or available for the whole world. The recent electricity issues that western Europe faced are indicative of the failings of unSustainable energy.

The recent electricity issues are because Putin invaded Ukraine and reduced the gas supply. Which is nothing to do with sustainable energy.

"We said we were running on renewables, but we were also dependent on burning Russian gas, and we plan to keep burning gas for the foreseeable future, sans the buying-gas-from-Russia part" sounds like a pretty important detail to talk about sustainable energy, IMHO.

"Renewables need to be supplemented" is a very different claim from "the only thing that would move the needle ... is reliable nuclear energy" (emphasis added).

Nuclear energy can't solve the problem on its own either, because you still need plants to deal with rapid changes in demand. We shouldn't be working towards a silver bullet, we should be using a lot of different technologies together to solve the problem.

You just need nuclear and existing hydropower, which boils down to you just need nuclear. It's not politically probable or realistic though, but we really just need nuclear technically speaking.

Nuclear can also follow loads, but there's no economical need to build them to do that (in almost any market).

The problem is that a lot of the claims of "Renewables providing X percent of energy in country Y" are massaging the numbers. See the countless examples from Germany over the last decade (I'm including one of the most shared examples of this at the bottom of my post), suddenly shown to be highly deceptive by what has happened over the last year with Russian gas imports to Germany.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-about-...

Nuclear reactors are expensive because we don’t build any of them.

Solar and wind occupy way more land for the same power production and can’t produce baseload power without battery storage systems that cost 5x as much.

Bingo. Solar panels were outrageously expensive 15 years ago, but that didn't stop us from investing in them as a technology.

Nuclear reactors are expensive mostly because the regulatory requirements make them expensive. There is a lot of room for advanced nuclear (e.g. gen III reactors) that can address a lot of the problems and bring down the costs. Unfortunately, we don't have a clear regulatory pathway here yet, but there is some progress being made recently.

Sharing this not to say it’s true, but it’s my understanding of the EU’s biomass numbers.

As I understand it, a substantial portion of the biomass is wood pellets. These are harvested from the American south causing deforestation, are transported over the ocean with non-negligible emissions, and then burned in non-clean stacks releasing carbon, but they are accounted for as green. So you get a dirty burn, dirty transportation, and deforest a region as part of these numbers.

A quick search turned up this article: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/07/us/american-south-bi...

Its hard for me to accept that this narrative is correct, but I've struggled to find anything that explains how EU's biomass is net good for the environment. Do you have any insight?

This isn't true and you are also probably confusing energy and electricity

Edit: wow, since I'm receiving instant downvotes, here's the evidence.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

> They would have to find another “the sky is falling down” cause.

You've nailed it. The people in power don't want to fix these problems. They'd like them to get worse, actually. "Never let a crisis go to waste" has the corollary "if a crisis doesn't exist, create one."

We are big believers in Nuclear energy, and it's part of the RFS.

But many other sectors need to be electrified for nuclear power to have its decarbonization impact: buildings, industry, transportation etc.

A great list to start with yet there are still several items missing from their projected speculations. As a core software architect and founder who has built multiple acquired ecommerce systems prior to and since the dotcom bust long ago I feel it prudent to emphasize to those that lack the experience to see what is happening yet again in an even more critical modern societal industry. The coming energy opportunities for those entrepreneurs among us here that possess the appropriate subject matter knowledge across hardware and software is significant, I cannot state it enough, “extremely significant”. Should you have the tenacity and drive to create and build something which others state is not possible then there is no time like the present to start and prove them wrong as every living person NEEDS energy. Who knows, maybe along the way you even enjoy the journey and make a little income too.

This paragraph seems gpt-like

I unfortunately regret to disappoint you that a living breathing homo sapien wrote this, me. My writing style is mine and mine alone although GPT could very well imitate my style but in this case it did not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com