Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

> I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels.

The above is a reasonable statement, however, your website says the following:

> We can’t quit carbon without energy storage. To stop climate change, renewables must replace fossil fuels.

> Without energy storage, renewables will fail to reach even 25% of the energy market by 2040. This will cause global temperatures to rise over 3°C, a level which will cause catastrophic climate damage.

Those are not only misleading but outright lies. Now, I won't hide my bias here: I work on nuclear fission. But here's the reality: there are many possible pathways to net-zero carbon and limiting global temperature rise to well below 3°C (below 1.5°C in fact)

To just list a few:

* Massive adoption of nuclear fission alone

* Development & massive adoption of nuclear fusion alone

* Shift from coal&oil to natural gas, cleaner fossil fuels + scaling carbon capture/sequestration

* Shift from fossil fuels to renewables + storage (probably not alone)

Or any combination of those, in addition to a number of alternative approaches.

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Edit: Also, it should be noted that the energy sector alone only represents about 1/5 of the emissions problem. In order to get to net-zero GHG and stop anthroprogenic climate change, the clean energy sector needs to expand well past the current global TPES and supply net-zero electricity that allows for the decarbonization of the other main contributors:

Agriculture, steel+cement+plastic, transportation, buildings&appliances, and flora loss leading to lost carbon stores (deforestation etc)

Even if renewables and storage could supply 100% of our electricity or even total power supply, you would still only be 1/5 done solving climate change. There is no unitary solution.

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Acting as though renewables are necessary, instead of one of multiple options, is denial or malicious. In reality, renewable energy is nowhere near capable of reliably and safely taking on a large portion of our energy supply globally. It is expensive (you can make claims about unit cost, but what really matters is country-scale - look at German electricity prices vs. just about everywhere else), it is dangerous, it takes a lot of land area, and it is the least reliable.

I don't want to spend a lot of time here stomping on renewables, but there is plenty of reason to, and my main point is that I feel it is unjust and immoral for you to claim that renewables "must replace fossil fuels" if we are to stop climate change. It's just not true, and you need to admit that.

The energy industry is arguably one of if not the most important backbone of our modern society, and responsible for the safety and health of billions of people. Whether you're working on the generation or storage side, it is all our responsibility to be honest and make true claims - not to spread biased misinformation when it benefits your particular solution.

I'd like to finish by making it clear I'm very happy you're working on your tech and I hope you succeed in making it the best it can be - renewables are certainly trending to higher adoption and we need reliable, efficient, scalable storage solution in order to avoid dangerous outages and other grid issues.

You bring up valid criticisms of existing solutions, although I do think you should also be fair to those. Most things in life are a trade-off: maybe pumped hydro is a better majority solution for the grid, but lithium ion is an incredibly important, successful and expanding technology that needs to be given credit for its wide range of great applications.

I hope this response has not been inflammatory: I just very much care about maintaining a truthful public discussion around energy. I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you can take something useful from this.

While in college (CS & Math), I got heavily interested in growing food in the most efficient and healthiest way possible. I was a dreamer when I started so I thought more of how to grow 'earthly' produce on Mars, but then I realized that my own planet Earth is so massively underserved.

It's basically like this- I mastered growing leafy greens in indoor closed environmenet, then I tried to cover all the major physical and biological markers, then I try to optimize the most optimal levels of 5-6 variables (currently) that I can fully control and may produce the best phenotype- CO2, O2, Light, Nitrate, P, K. These parameters have their own sub definitions.

So far I have had great results. I am trying to raise investment so I can finally make it a reality. Check the numbers here: hexafarms.com (no fluff)