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Request for Startups: Climate Tech

ycombinator.com

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Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#191

Post by brutusborn »

ngoilapites wrote: post #189

I am 10+ years in the Climate arena and it surprises me that most innovations ignore human behaviour: I see a gap. 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?

I had the same thought. I’m in energy infra design so I care mainly about tech that helps me implement renewables easier.

For consumers, simple tools to help them make green decisions would be useful (LCA as you mentioned). Im interested, what kind of behavioural research applications do you mean?

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#192

Post by smaddox »

rabernat wrote: post #184
jandrewrogers wrote: post #65

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…

Agree 100%. This is big part of the motivation behind our new startup Earthmover: https://earthmover.io/ 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 th…

I'm curious, have you considered using PyTorch or JAX for tensor processing? ML libraries seem to be much further along when it comes to performing compute-intensive, hardware-accelerated operations on Tensor's. And you get gradients basically for free (in terms of developer time). Also, the kernel compiler being added PyTorch 2 looks very promising.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#193

Post by chris_va »

gumby wrote: post #139
cjcenizal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds amazing! Could you share more info about your startup?

You can read more at www.bluedotchange.com 4 Gt is roughly all the anthropogenic CH4, responsible for about a third (or possibly a half) of temperature rise. After that we will continue at a lower level in order to keep curating the level and as a precaution against methane bursts. 4 Gt of CH4 is considered roughly equivalent to 120 Gt of CO2

Ah, the ISA approach. I could never calibrate the fringy-ness of that idea.

Do you have evidence that it works in-situ, or any ideas of how to test this in an observable way? If so, there are folks interested.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#194

Post by fomine3 »

ibejoeb wrote: post #111
bombcar wrote: post #104

> Tesla for home appliances: re-inventing home appliances (water heaters, induction stoves, clothes dryers, etc) to create better consumer experiences using specific advantages of electric technology. I mean heat pump water heaters already exist [346] and they're reasonable in most everywhere (they put extra load on the furnace in cold climates in the winter but can still be a win overall). The main advance here migh…

>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?

Efficiency by heat pump

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#195

Post by snordgren »

fundad wrote: post #13
ravenstine wrote: post #9

> Tesla for home appliances: re-inventing home appliances (water heaters, induction stoves, clothes dryers, etc) to create better consumer experiences using specific advantages of electric technology. > Tesla-like experience for home energy management: smart hub, including smart charging, load shifting, software-based load shedding for improved resiliency, and better circuit-level energy use measurement. With how Tes…

Venture capitalists using Tesla in some kind of virtue signal is the most 2022 thing

Considering what a terrible year this has been for Tesla stock and their absentee CEO it would be more fitting in 2021.

The brand has enough baggage by now that the second-highest comment chain is about its unsuitability as an ideal, rather than discussing the content itself.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#196

Post by worldsayshi »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #169
worldsayshi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What potential customers are there for climate intelligence systems?

Don't think of it as a "climate intelligence" system. It is really an "analyze complex dynamics in the physical world at global scale" system, one application of which is climate intelligence. Everything is fundamentally anchored to space and time, and connected by it. The applicability cuts across industries. It would enable managing many kinds of risks that have nothing to do with climate.

Makes sense. Although to have such a big scope and understand how to satisfy such cross cutting concerns where tools aren't built yet it sounds like you you kind of need to understand a lot about everything.

I do see that when you really understand the problem you can build such a tool in a non-domain specific way as you describe without inconceivable effort but understanding up to that point is kind of the whole problem?

Edit: Btw, really sounds like a space where I would like to build stuff in. I kind of understand what you're aiming for but I feel like it's very easy to jump to conclusions and build air castles.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#198

Post by fundad »

snordgren wrote: post #195
fundad wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Venture capitalists using Tesla in some kind of virtue signal is the most 2022 thing

Considering what a terrible year this has been for Tesla stock and their absentee CEO it would be more fitting in 2021. The brand has enough baggage by now that the second-highest comment chain is about its unsuitability as an ideal, rather than discussing the content itself.

That was the point. It’s vey 2022 to gaslight us about how we’re experiencing these VC darlings.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#200

Post by rabernat »

smaddox wrote: post #192
rabernat wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. This is big part of the motivation behind our new startup Earthmover: https://earthmover.io/ 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 th…

I'm curious, have you considered using PyTorch or JAX for tensor processing? ML libraries seem to be much further along when it comes to performing compute-intensive, hardware-accelerated operations on Tensor's. And you get gradients basically for free (in terms of developer time). Also, the kernel compiler being added PyTorch 2 looks very promising.

PyTorch and JAX are used heavily in climate science on the ML side. For more general analytics, not so much. Many of our users like to use Xarray as a high-level API. There has been some work to integrate Xarray with PyTorch (https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/3232) but we're not there yet.

The Python Array API standard should help align these different back-ends: https://data-apis.org/array-api/latest/

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