Fixing Climate Change May Add No Costs, Report Says | Hacker News Reader

Fixing Climate Change May Add No Costs, Report Says

nytimes.com

16 pointsmetermaid7 comments

I have a startup in energy, and one thing that I think entrepreneurs outside of energy don't understand is just how ridiculously high the ceiling is in this space.

In our lifetimes (~40yrs), we will have to replace the 87% of the energy sources that are adding carbon to the carbon cycle[1]. That's ~450 Quadrillion BTUs (QBTU) per year[2]. No matter what, this will happen.

Do you know how much solar the US installed in 2012? 30 Gigawatts[3], which equals ~0.9 QBTU/yr. Even if solar eventually only amounts to 20% of the total fuel replacement (~90 QBTU/yr), that's a 100x growth in 40 years for an already huge industry. That's Internet revolution scale growth.

And that's only one industry. What about energy efficiency? There's so much opportunity for tech disruption there, and the ceiling is just as high as solar.

Why the hell are entrepreneurs (and investors) trying to make the next big app when the ceiling is so much higher in cleantech? The next Google will be an energy company.

[1] - http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951

[2] - http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=44&p...

[3] - http://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/24/npd-solarbuzz-predict-ma...

It's a very valid point. However, here's my armchair conclusion - energy efficiency is crazy hard. I invested in a solar company about ~5 yrs ago and watched as the market rarely met expectations. No idea where it is now, but my general conclusion was that the cost to do business in this area rarely outweighed the benefits (i.e. profits).

But isn't that a case of selling shovels vs mining yourself?

No one made money on solar itself because everyone made the rational decision to invest in it at the same time. That produced an oversupply, which meant less profits, but a very successful outcome in terms of supply.

That doesn't mean there aren't opportunities - just that they are hard to predict during disruption (what's new, right?)

Right, but what shovels are you going to sell during the solar gold rush?

> That produced an oversupply, which meant less profits

No idea honestly. My assumption was that the energy efficiency of solar (i.e. how much it costs to R&D + implement) has been so poor that many people/organizations ditched it.

I hate to be that guy but looking at the app startups, don't you think it's easier to write a Yo! app than it is to actually invent and implement a disrupting technology in the energy sector? Effort to ROI in the app business probably looks really tempting, regardless of whether or not it's actually true.

Actually, it's really not. Most software in the energy industry is laughably antiquated and ripe for disruption. For example, my startup (utilityapi.com) is just a simple SaaS that downloads bills for solar and energy efficiency companies. Imagine my shock when I originally started working in the industry and this process was still manual and a huge time sink.

The biggest reason I think more entrepreneurs don't enter the space is likely that the pain points are unknown to them. If you don't spend half your day manually downloading utility bills, you wouldn't know that there are lots of people willing to pay money to automate that process.

I agree with the pain points, for me they are unknown and that's also why it feels like I could sit down and write another communications app, but couldn't contribute to the energy sector. The utility bills sounds part sounds insane, I hope you are successful, good luck!

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