mattygh

This looks similar to how mosaic[1] started in 2010, they since moved away from crowdfunding

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

Brutal attitude, also wrong. 2 degrees warming is probably inevitable at this point. Not great. But 3 degrees is much worse than 2, and 4 is much worse than 3, etc. There’s no concept of losing, just how bad it will get for future generations.

Open charge point protocol (OCPP) is used by all EVs and EV chargers currently for charger management, and they are working on an enhancement that will allow your car to directly exchange payment info with the charger via the charging hardware - no more app needed. It’ll take a few years to take hold but I’m very hopeful this works out, it will make the whole thing so much easier.

Sense is great, but way overkill for demand response. Also, measurement needs to be billing grade accuracy, and I don't think Sense is going for that

The market is a little more dynamic than that, wholesale bidding into the ISOs is still the biggest option but many utilities run load shifting programs of various sizes as well.

Still, the conclusion is like you said. There's basically no real-world scenario where it makes sense for a residential customer to go it alone, because they can make at most a couple hundred bucks a year. So makes sense for their device companies or someone else to figure it out with utility and pay thousands of homeowners to agree to participate. Ohmconnect has a cool service in California.

Not true, it would work with hourly pricing. Still requires smart meters but those are something like 60-70% of homes in the US now. Even without real time or time of use based pricing, load shifting can still be valued and paid for as a service. Look up Demand Response: >$1Bn market in the US.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response

I have been in this industry for about the same amount of time, and I absolutely could not have said it better. People entering the space can either try to learn from this article or learn these lessons themselves over 2-3 years, I hope they can do the former to avoid spinning their wheels.

Yes it is: https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/arctic-meteorology/climate_chan...

"Over the past 30 years, it has warmed more than any other region on earth"

That's fair. The question of what to do about it is purely political - let's take our best estimates of what the effects of climate change are going to be, our best estimates of the cost and ways to reduce the bad effects, and come up with an approach.

I think you're understating the amount of real science that is available for the effects of continued GHG emissions on our climate. Agreed that the effect it will ultimately have on our civilization is truly speculation because that depends on our response over the next 50-100 years.

Your comment made me think of people who say we need to move to Mars because of climate change... there's no shortage of dumb arguments on both sides of the debate. But to be clear, based on what I know, I would still advocate an aggressive move towards decarbonization.

Are you being facetious and saying you can’t prove climate change in the same way you can’t prove gravity exists? Or are you for real? Scientific proof has a different general meaning than what the general population calls proof, but the claim that more CO2 in the atmosphere leads to a warmer planet, and we can quite accurately project that correlation, is not remotely controversial. After a life of following this closely both in and out of academics I’m curious what makes you think differently to everyone that has looked into this closely, including unlikely people like oil companies and Jim Breidenstein. Read Merchants of Doubt if you’re interested in how it got so politicized.

I think the time frame is too long to make good money investing, the holding costs would kill you as the returns eventually come. I think about it more like where do you want to put down long term roots, given the disruption that will be caused by climate change in many places.

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than co2, traps about 30x more heat per molecule. On the flip side, it’s half life in the atmosphere until it gets re-absorbed by the earth is on the order of decades, while co2 is on the order of millennia, so if you take the long view it’s not as bad.

That's probably been the main driver over time

It's relatively easy for one person to source clean power themselves, just means that technically your payment goes to a wind farm instead of the grid as a whole, but really doesn't change much for the grid. It's much harder for everyone to get clean power, then you get very advanced issues balancing the variable nature of renewable generation.

In this case I believe it means carbon-free, so Nuclear is still technically viable though very unlikely any new Nuclear will be built. Will be mostly existing hydro, nuclear and geothermal with new solar & wind phasing out gas plants.

Compared to the rest of the USA (low bar), California is a saint. They started doing Energy Efficiency in the 70s, currently spend $1Bn / year on EE. Energy consumption as a whole in the state has flatlined since they started doing EE (1). All that to say, they're trying. It's crazy how much of a difference culture makes.

1: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/california-is-p...

This is the case for almost every island in the world!

I am loving this new love affair with cleantech and climate change from HN. So much good stuff in the front page last few weeks.

Good analogy - which one of Barry Bonds' 73 home runs in 2001 were because he was on steroids? Hard to pinpoint any single one, but he wouldn't have hit 73 if not for being steroid-enhanced.

I'm similarly optimistic that outcome is possible, maybe even probable, but I'm not excited for it. When it comes to population and the future, the question is less whether we can survive, the question is what kind of world is consistent with 20Bn people? Or 1 Trillion people?

If you value open space, wild places, other species' existence, bucolic lifestyles, or other non-techno sci fi outcomes, that's a scary thought. Maybe we will all move to space and keep earth as a re-wilded paradise for vacationing and research. Or maybe future generations won't care about any of that and will densely cover the whole planet, snuffing out anything that came before.

It's all about changing the goalposts. We have probably lost the war against 1.5 deg C climate change, as even if we were to freeze emissions now, I believe we would hit that (need fact check on that). We are currently losing the war against 2 deg C climate change. The next war is against 3 or 4 deg C climate change. All of these milestones have severe consequences more significant than the last, so all are worth fighting.

I agree, would love to find HN for cleantech.

I went through this search recently - companies at the nexus of software and cleantech in the bay area, here was my shortlist so you can see what kinds of things these companies are working on: AutoGrid, Bidgely, Ohm Connect, Tesla, Utility API, Omnidian, Stem, Advanced Microgrid Solutions

If you're thinking of starting something yourself, energy seems to be an especially idiosyncratic industry that I think doesn't lend itself easily to outside in solutions, it really pays to work in it for a couple years to soak up the knowledge. You'll find tons of opportunities once you're on the inside.

A few of the better opportunities that come to mind from my point of view: 1. Software & analytics based EE and DR (Bidgely, Autogrid, Ohmconnect, First Fuel) 2. Grid analytics, especially around citing and incorporating renewables, controlling batteries to maximize value to the grid and owner (AMS, Stem, Tesla) 3. Customer acquisition for cleantech products - small scale (helping sell devices to homes) and large scale (helping developing projects)

All of these things have significant software and analytics bent and will be key parts of the solution

This is a topic that you can't meaningfully unpack in a short essay. Whether or not you think this has merit, I'd recommend reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, it tackles this subject in a more philosophical way and is very thought provoking. It is similarly opinionated, but helps you question things you would have never even considered before.

Which part of the country are you in? In the northern parts of the country the supply / demand imbalance between summer solar gen and winter heating requirements are huge, either you're producing 10x more solar than you need in summer or supplementing heat in the winter - or you have an extremely well insulated school bus!

Continent-scale grids of the scale we need look very unlikely to happen due to regulatory / NIMBY concerns - see the decade long delays for Clean Line Energy to get anything moving. Maybe we'll get a federal administration bold enough to push it through but I wouldn't count on it. That means we'll have to vastly overbuild solar + storage as you said. Luckily the current cost trajectory makes that look possible, but seems worthwhile to have demand side planning in the mix to balance the overbuilding.

I'd be very surprised if hydrogen vehicles work out. Hydrogen is not a source but rather a store of energy like a battery is. There's a few practical and technical issues:

1 it would require building out entirely new infrastructure, running up against severe NIMBYism at this point. It's incredibly hard to even build new power lines right now. Try a highly combustible, very leaky gas.

2 it's far cheaper to just strip H2 from natural gas, which releases carbon (unless you capture it, increasing cost), so not carbon free unless you force using electrolysis from renewable power sources

3 Electrolysis efficiency is ~70%, fuel cell efficiency is ~60%, so round trip efficiency is <50%. Much more waste than a battery (~80%). You're both using essentially the same electricity to create the power, but hydrogen is wasting more of it, so will necessarily be more expensive

4 in vehicles, fuel cells end up charging the battery toi power the motor anyway, so the energy loss from the battery is a wash

The one thing they have is range and speed to refuel, but as batteries get cheaper and better that will be minimized before H2 gets big enough to take over.

There's lots of big companies with smart people who are still pushing for this so hopefully they know what they are doing (mostly in Japan it seems)