Hacker News Reader

corradioon Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I’m working on Polynomial (https://polynomial.so), which is a small dashboard for key business metrics. It has open source integrations to most popular systems and has Google sheets export in case you want to do something with the data.

As a founder, I really needed a simple place to centralize all those business metrics. Couldn’t find anything that suited my needs (everything was way overkill) and so I ended up building Polynomial.

corradioon Giant batteries are transforming the way the U.S. uses electricity

I am really impressed at how California has scaled up its use of batteries. I remember 5-6 years ago coding on Electricity Maps and seeing almost no storage (link: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO)

corradioon UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

Indeed I’ve reported the bug here: https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/i...

corradioon UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

If you’re curious, you can follow it live on https://app.electricitymaps.com

Right now it’s transporting ~20MW from Denmark to the UK

corradioon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

https://polynomial.so

https://github.com/corradio/polynomial

As founder, I lacked a central place to gather all my KPIs. It works by integrating to other data sources you already use (Google Analytics, Plausible, LinkedIn, Google Sheets..)

It’s open source, feel free to give it a try!

corradioon GB National Grid Status

A GitHub issue was filed regarding this: https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/i...

corradioon Ask HN: Working in tech for climate?

Hi there,

I had the same thoughts, which led me to build Electricity Maps (https://app.electricitymaps.com) a few years back, mainly to understand the current state of how electricity grids cause CO2 emissions. Luckily (and with a lot of hard work) it turned into a successful company. I also worked on some other climate tech products which weren’t as fortunate. I’ve written about past experiences here: https://oliviercorradi.com/blog/lessons-learned-climate-tech...

Hopefully this can help you a bit on your journey.

We’re also hiring (although jobs are based in Copenhagen). Furthermore, a lot of our work is open source (https://github.com/electricitymap/electricitymap-contrib) - feel free to take a peek!

In any case, do not hesitate to get in touch if you think I can help

corradioon NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard

This data is also be visualized on https://electricitymap.org where it is compared to other areas.

corradioon Lessons learned after 5 years of climate tech entrepreneurship

Thank you for the kind thoughts. These kind of messages are what keep us going ;-)

corradioon Live electricity production/consumption CO2 map

Hello, Olivier here, author of the map and founder of the company behind it. We're working on adding more countries on the map. Check again in a few months and hopefully we'll have more of them!

corradioon Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

Hello, Olivier here (CEO Tomorrow) Indeed we're running on GCP, using a mixture of Python and Node. In terms of the approach, I suggest checking out our blog (https://www.tmrow.com/blog) and this talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAelZb2ZYwI) which might provide a bit of clarity.

Also, feel free to join our Slack at https://slack.tmrow.com to ask your questions!

corradioon Ask HN: Who Here Is Working to Fix the Environment?

I'm the founder of Tomorrow (https://www.tmrow.com), where we 3 years ago built https://www.electricitymap.org (it's open source).

We're seeking to build scalable digital solutions to climate change. Our mission is to organise the world's carbon information, and make it universally accessible. Therefore, we're now working on an app that automatically calculates your personal carbon footprint, and gives you the means to act on it.

A lot of our work is open source: see https://github.com/tmrowco

I also wrote a pragmatic guide to climate change here: https://www.tmrow.com/climatechange

Hope this can guide or even inspire some other folks out there.

corradioon Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

Hello! I asked myself the same question, and ended up founding Tomorrow (https://www.tmrow.com).

I believe understanding the footprint of anything should be a commodity, and easily accessible to anyone. That's why we're currently building an app that automatically computes your carbon footprint, and gives you the means to change for the better. I previously built electricitymap.org, and we're now hiring if you're interested: https://www.tmrow.com/jobs Feel free to reach out directly if you want to chat (or join our Slack at slack.tmrow.com). This is the most pressing issue of our time and we simply don't have enough people working or caring about it.

A bit of reading: - http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ - https://www.tmrow.com/climatechange

Olivier

corradioon How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

Sounds timely now that Games of Thrones starts again

corradioon Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, report says

For those who are interested, you can see in real-time the charge/discharge of the battery on the electricityMap: https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...

corradioon What can I do about climate change?

We wrote a more in-depth guide to climate change (what it is and what we can do) here, as part of our startup called Tomorrow:

http://tmrow.com/climatechange.html

Feedback is welcome!

corradioon California Moves to Require 100% Clean Electricity by 2045

That's very interesting. Right now California seems to run about 40-60% renewable according to https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...

corradioon Electricity Map – Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

You are completely right. We are trying to get some funding to start an initiative to update emission factors per country. This is important.

- Olivier

corradioon Electricity Map – Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

See https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/maste...

- Olivier

corradioon Electricity Map – Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

Yes we were thinking of making that, but we are a bit afraid of the amount of data that needed to be transmitted.

We had an issue opened here: https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/issues/733

Feel free to help us at https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib

- Olivier

corradioon Electricity Map – Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

Hi @trzeci,

Author of the electricityMap here. The point of the app is to display how much CO2 is emitted when you consume from your power plug (hence the consumption point of view, and hence why we emphasise intensity and not volume). We're trying to give people an idea of when it is the best time to consume electricity, and what strategies are best to decarbonise rapidly.

Total volumes are also interesting (the climate cares about total volumes), but if you want to look at strategies you have to look at per kWh values (coal in a small volume is still a bad strategy).

- Olivier

corradioon Electricity Map – Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

Hi, electricityMap author here. When clicking on a country, just click "Emissions" and then you will see total volumes (tCO2/h) instead of intensity :)

EDIT: It's actually by minute.

- Olivier

corradioon Boeing-Backed Startup Lands JetSuite for Electric Plane's Debut

Given the title I thought they literally "landed" an electric plane, which would be quite nice for a startup. Turns out I was baited into clicking.

> Boeing Co.-backed startup Zunum Aero plans to deliver its first hybrid-electric plane in 2022 to JetSuite Inc

corradioon Norwegian Shipbuilders Turning to Battery Power

Let's also remember it matters where the electricity comes from. You're not necessarily going green if you use coal-based electricity.

Source: https://www.electricitymap.org

corradioon Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

Feel free to submit a pull request to update our numbers!

corradioon Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

The map does not claim to conclude on anything else than Carbon emissions. Many other things need to be taken into account when considering decisions, and this is merely one decision (albeit a very important one!)

corradioon Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

Calculations details are here: https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap#carbon-intensity-c... We use IPCC LCA data for the production mix, and use a coupled linear system of equations to take into account imports in a dynamic manner.

Generation data is realtime and comes from ENTSOE (https://transparency.entsoe.eu)

corradioon First Support for a Physics Theory of Life

Good read concerning this topic: Into the Cool (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52737.Into_the_Cool)

corradioon SpaceX BFR [video]

wait and what's the energy usage of that thing? Carbon footprint?

corradioon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2017)

Tomorrow (https://www.tmrow.com) | Copenhagen | Full-time | Onsite / remote

We use science, data and machine learning to automatically quantify the environmental impact of our daily decisions. We present this information in a simple and elegant way, empowering anyone to have a tangible and positive impact.

We're hiring a co-founder level product manager and frontend developer. We're basing our stack on Node, Docker, React-Native + Redux. Check out more on our website.