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Request for Startups: Climate Tech

ycombinator.com

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Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#141

Post by kokanee »

Raed667 wrote: post #66

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

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.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#142

Post by phillipcarter »

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.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#143

Post by philipkglass »

algoatecorn wrote: post #120

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 ele…

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.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#144

Post by tdaltonc »

janalsncm wrote: post #125

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…

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?

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#146

Post by a_square_peg »

baremetal wrote: post #122
a_square_peg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#148

Post by carabiner »

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.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#149

Post by janalsncm »

carabiner wrote: post #118
dqpb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#150

Post by quelsolaar »

tdaltonc wrote: post #15
quelsolaar wrote: post #3

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 cost…

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.
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