More Places to Design for the Climate
MCJ Collective created a wonderful resource called Guide to Software in Climate Tech to help developers think about where to apply their skills. They recently summarized the key points in the article Coding a Path to Solutions: A Guide to Software in Climate Tech. I’ll pull out some juicy bits relevant to designers who want to work on software:
Design tools & Dashboards
A pure software category is specialized design software for a particular vertical. Just as every UX designer needs Figma,every solar engineer needs a tool for designing custom solar systems. What else is like this? EV charging infrastructure, utility grid design, commercial HVAC systems, battery storage systems, farm management, and so much more!
Analogies: Figma, Adobe, Jira, Salesforce
Pricing: SaaS, Enterprise contract
Examples: Aurora Solar builds solar system design software and Flipturn builds EV fleet management software. Conduit is building new HVAC system design tools.
Devices
The consumers of today already expect their home thermostats and cars to be software driven experiences. However, most devices remain disconnected. In a home alone—most people’s refrigeration, water heating, cooking devices, dryers, etc. are all operating without real-time utility information. From both a cost and grid health perspective, we need both consumer and commercial devices that can operate more intelligently. This won’t happen with new software or hardware alone, rather it requires packaging the two together in a new generation of products.
Analogies: Ring, Kindle, Oculus, Apple
Pricing: Device purchases
Examples: Altus Thermal is building a new water heater system that incorporates a thermal battery that “charges” at the most efficient time. Therma builds connected sensors that monitor commercial cold-chains and can cycle off refrigeration opportunistically. Gridware monitors power line health in realtime. Channing Street Copper and Impulse are building induction stoves with included energy storage that reduce installation complexity while giving your home a big battery. Milllaunched a new connected kitchen scrap bin that plans to make chicken feed from food scraps. Span builds smart electrical panels to become the intelligent home hub. Remora is building a carbon capture device for long haul trucking. Gradient, Quilt, and Dandelion Energy have all built much better devices for heating and cooling our homes. And of course the massive and fun category of electrified transport: from Tesla to Rivian or to glimpse the future of boating or camping you can look to Arcand the Lightship. All of these vehicles have deeply innovative software experiences, with users calling them a “giant iPhone on wheels.”
Marketplaces
New products, funding, services, and people need to be matched across nearly every industry. Each is an opportunity for a marketplace.
👉 The needs for marketplaces in climate are so numerous and interesting, it’s worth throwing out a few examples:
Homeowners need to find electrification contractors (solar/HVAC/etc installs)
Consumers need to be able to buy and sell used EVs
Solar developers need to find tax credit (ITC) buyers
Electrification contractors need to buy supplies
Banks and cities need to find building owners to do sustainability projects
Land owners need to find the right farmers to rent their land
Farmers need to find new suppliers and buyers of new products (e.g. biochar)
Companies need to find and train talented people to work on these problems!
Analogies: LinkedIn, Airbnb, Uber, Amazon Marketplace, TrueCar
Pricing: Marketplace transaction margin and advertising
Examples: Recurrent builds a marketplace tool to value used EV batteries. Evergreen helps businesses find and fund renewable energy projects. Patch is a marketplace for carbon removal. ClimateFarmers funds European farmers transitioning to regenerative practices via a marketplace for carbon. InRangehelps EU landlords add clean energy to their buildings and monetize it via a marketplace for energy buyers. Terra.do, Climate Draft, Climatebase, and Greenwork are all social software platforms helping bring more talent into the space.
Sound cool? Read more in MCJ’s Guide to Software in Climate Tech.