181–190 of 282 posts
Attempting to solve climate change with virtue-signalling consumption and production is worse than useless. That doesn't mean such things are necessarily bad startup ideas, though, but few things turn me off more than this sort of thing.
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/request-for-startups-water/
Most people don't equate watertech with climatetech, but climate change is primarily a water crisis—flood & drought—and we need more entrepreneurs in watertech.
If you are building something in watertech, ping me, I'm happy to help.
Do people really believe we can innovate our way through climate change?
I've worked in "climate intelligence" for many years. The list overlooks one of the largest and most immediate opportunities around that market: the data infrastructure and analysis tools we have today are profoundly unfit for purpose. Just about everyone is essentially using cartography tools to do large-scale spatiotemporal analysis of sensor and telemetry data. The gaps for both features and practical scalability…
Our mission is to make it easier to work with scientific data at scale in the cloud, focusing mainly on the climate, weather, and geospatial vertical.
My cofounder Joe Hamman and I are climate scientists who helped create the Pangeo project. We are also core devs on the Python packages Xarray and Zarr. We think that a layer of managed services (think a "modern data stack" oriented around the multidimensional array data model) is exactly what this ecosystem needs to make it easier for teams to build data-intensive products in the climate-tech space.
And we're hiring! https://earthmover.io/posts/earthmover-is-hiring/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>water heaters Are we being serious? I have an electric water heater. I have an induction cooktop, which is electric by necessity. I have an electric clothes dryer. (Is there even a consumer-grade gas-fired clothes dryer on the market?) The consumer experience is fine. I turn on the hot water tap and hot water comes out. What am I missing?
The only thing I can think of is a water heater that knows when power is cheap and preheats water hotter than it needs to be so it's available when you need it without using power ... I guess?
The opportunity to reduce carbon emissions is pretty massive when done at scale, because water heating accounts for 25% of home energy use in California.
In general, there is a big rush of companies, both startups and established, into the DER space right now, I suspect because of both the relatively low cost of entry and the high value of the grid services (frequency regulation, peak load avoidance) they are usually bidding on.
I'm going to throw this out there: most of the promising companies in this space are likely going to get their seed funding from federal grants rather than incubators like YC. You may not be seeing deal flow because your product is unattractive to them in comparison.
This may have been true a few years ago but climate tech is very trendy among investors right now, and every VC is going to want their piece. https://www.svb.com/industry-insights/clean-tech-sustainabil...
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…
Do people really believe we can innovate our way through climate change?
Yes, in fact I think we probably already have. There's still some politicss to overcome, but if the cheapest source of energy is low carbon then the problem is mostly solved in the big picture. As long as we don't hit too many tipping points we should be okay.
While low carbon electricity might be the cheapest source of energy on spot markets, that's a really tiny part of the picture. We still need to figure out large scale storage and electrify everything, those aren't solved problems.
But let's assume we solve them. Do we have enough metallic resources on Earth that we can extract cheaply? Do we have enough cheap fossil fuels left to actually do that?
Historically there's no energy transition:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
New sources of energy have made the world consume more of the old ones, not less. Same thing with technological innovation and gains in energy efficiency.
I see two folk types here: the Climate scientist and the carbon life cycle Analyst.
How come social sciences (I am in particular hinting at behavioral research) have not been found yet a source of value?