Just 2 Minutes On Some New Climate Tech

So much has changed since my hair was long, I dreamt of starting a revolution, and politicians still ignored climate change. That was 2016.

Now, over four years have passed. Donald Trump is out and Biden is in. The Sunrise Movement, and it’s youthful spirit, have injected politics with the ideas of the future.

Things are changing and they’re changing fast.

Below are a few companies I discovered today, which seem to be offering cool new tech-based solutions:

Patch — to summarize, and I am no expert, it’s like a bunch of young people from my generation and below are beginning to gain political and economic influence. We want to buy things that are “carbon negative.” When we buy our soda, we want to know that a tree was planted. This planet is dying. What Patch does is this: Patch connects the little guys, the small mom and pops, the you’s and the me’s, the enterprises with less time and money than the giants like Microsoft and Google, the people who can’t afford the transaction costs of figuring out how to make their business “carbon negative,” to negative emissions technolgoy — forests, regenerative soil, biochar. Query, has Patch heard of Corigin or the Salk Institute? Sounds like they could partner.

WattTime — there’s an old school and a new school. The old school story goes something like this: Me want warm house. Me need energy. Me burn fossil fuel. Oh No! Me see climate change! Me want to reduce emissions. Me use less energy, right? Or, how about this, instead of me using less energy, how about me move to the Pacific Northwest to reduce my carbon footprint becuase the “average emissions factor” of power in the Pacific Northwest is very clean (e.g., perhaps just 25% the emissions intensity of natural gas because hydropower provides, on average, 75% of the region’s power, and gas-fired power plants provide the remaining 25%)!? But the new school story goes like this: If you want to stay warm and reduce your emissions, use WattTime’s AER technology — it’s Automated Emissions Reduction Technology. Use it because electricity grids are complicated. For example, in many places (like the Pacific Northwest), depending on the time that you add new energy consuming devices to the grid, natural gas —instead of, say, a clean energy like hydropower — might be turned on (i.e. dirty power plants might end up being the “marginal resource” of energy for the grid). WattTime’s AER helps your IoT devices grab power from the grid at the cleanest times — the times when the marginal resource of energy is clean!

Aurora Solar — concession here, I haven’t had time to dive into the details, but imagine this: You’re building a solar farm. You want to know where you should put it and how much sun it will get. Use Aurora Solar and its software to essentially run a quick 2020 appropriate simulation on your computer to design the farm and understand what its financials will look like in minutes. Pretty cool