| >sorry carbon accounting software doesn't move the needle I think the place where software could be really useful is with demand response and grid management. There's tons of work in that space already. Seems to me that long-duration storage and electrochemical production of fuels/chemicals/materials are the places where new technology is really needed, thinking ahead to when we get to 100% decarbonization of the grid and beyond that to when we try to decarbonize everything else. If the exponential growth and learning rates of solar keep up, in 15-20 years it will meet our entire projected primary energy demand and cost 5x less than the going rate for electricity right now. (Those are big 'if's, though!) Alan Kay[0]: "The key to the Parc approach was to be able to do many experiments in the future without having to optimize." What technology are we going to need 15-20 years from now, when solar energy is 5x cheaper, that doesn't exist yet? My thinking is that electrochemistry is the big missing puzzle piece. If we totally dropped fossil fuels, we'd need to pump something like the entire present-day electric grid's worth of power into making chemicals/fuels. Some companies with new technologies in this space that I like: -Form Energy: low-cost iron-air batteries -Prometheus: solar fuels from CO2 -Boston Metal: zero-carbon steelmaking -Twelve (formerly Opus 12): other chemicals from CO2 -Carbon Engineering: air capture of CO2 [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11955020 Edit: formatting |