Technologies: Python, JavaScript, DC power systems (solar, batteries, charge control, inverters, system design), embedded systems (lighting, sensors, motor control)
10 years of experience in climate tech, in utility industry software and clean energy hardware deployment.
I have deep domain expertise in electricity price modeling, financing for distributed energy resources, and grid-independent system design and deployment. I have designed and built AI systems for extracting tariff document data, and if your company is pursuing this particular white whale, I’d be happy to help you.
Seeking a high-impact role in climate tech, as close as possible to direct clean energy deployment.
It's hard to overstate the degree to which the United States is giving away the future to any country that can produce clean energy technology at scale.
Lithium is abundant in the United States. Nothing in the component chain of solar and battery systems is so complex it couldn't be made here. We could establish trade with African countries like China has, instead of doing these pointless tariffs. But for idiotic cultural reasons, we are not doing any of those things.
The world will permanently shift away from the fossil fuel economy sooner than most people think, and it will disrupt the entire system of dollar-denominated oil that underpins the U.S. empire. It's glaringly obvious where this is headed. And yet!
I work in the energy industry. Any future containing widespread use of AI will require a hard electrical infrastructure upgrade equivalent to the initial deployment of electricity and phone lines. The intersection of AI and the electrical grid is a hard and as-yet-unsolved problem. Either way, power infrastructure will drive our destiny as much or more than AI.
Why? The transmission system is used to span distance to bring energy from large producers to large concentrations of consumers. Traditionally power consumption was concentrated in and around cities while power generation happened away from cities.
Datacenters require relatively few people to operate so do not need to be located in or near population centers. Sites are chosen on this basis - DCs are sited close to generation or significant transmission system nodes
Every professional conference and publication in the energy industry is starting to look at this, because the sheer amount of power required for these data centers is already putting stress on grid capacity.
Also, AI data centers aren’t just sited for proximity to power generation. They're often sited for access to water for cooling. Not all of those sites already have appropriate power infrastructure.
So basically China has the infrastructure & raw materials for properly utilizing AI & America doesn't.
I really wonder if America will wake up because China crushes us under their feet. I kind of doubt it.
We beat the USSR due to their style of government being absolutely terrible. China's form of authoritarianism has proven far more adaptable. Not to mention that America's governance is showing risks of sliding towards corrupt authoritarianism as well. If both forms of government suck from an idealistic perspective, then China's manufacturing, rare earth metals, growing naval capacity, experience in stealing IP, & energy infrastructure seem to give it the advantage.
The only thing that I think that America has going for it right now is possibly control of space through SpaceX.
Even if we did manage to achieve such an upgrade, we would still have to successfully manage to secure the rare earths required for electronics manufacturing. Extracting and processing these resources is becoming more and more complex. Especially when you consider we would need these resources not only to sustain our current infrastructure, but also to improve it.
Projections of PV cell improvement and deployment by large energy forecasting agencies have been so wrong for so long that it’s a well known running joke in the energy industry.
Solar beats projections constantly and has been the cheapest available power source for many (if not all) applications for years already. Cheap, abundant, performant batteries already expand the possible surface area for solar deployment, and we can expect this to continue.
I have a hard time understanding what you mean by “proven insufficient.”
"Proven insufficient" when scoped to the sweeping social changes proposed by the author. PV cells are obviously effective and increasingly so over time, but further efficiency gains will not on their own topple dictatorships or cure diseases.
To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells' improvements need to be coincided with many other changes: grid development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling, climate policies/institutions, mining/extraction, agricultural methods, production methods... and that's without even discussing culture, which will have to evolve substantially.
It's a nice notion (and totally inline with the existing technocratic sentiment (eg, "more compute!")) that a single lever can just be pulled harder and problems will be magically solved. However, the world is much more complex than that; the complexity cannot be hand-waived away.
> To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells' improvements need to be coincided with many other changes: grid development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling, climate policies/institutions, mining/extraction, agricultural methods, production methods... and that's without even discussing culture, which will have to evolve substantially.
What a ridiculous take. PV's are plug and play, you don't have to change anything. The only dependency is storage, so battery tech needs to keep up. However, advancements in battery tech are already progressing at a rate that exceeds the pace of innovation in PV cells.
Let's use our imagination to overcome some naivety. Imagine for a moment that you just instantly 10x'ed the presence of PVs and tell me what will change. Do you truly believe that you will never encounter a bottleneck? Go on 10x'ing the presence of PVs until you find emerging constraints.
I'm sure that 10x the solar electricity output would substantially incentivize battery development and changes in industrial production, eventually producing major cultural implications. Long before utopia, however, we will encounter other bottlenecks: electrolysis, carbon policy, resource distribution (and other problems/opportunities worthy of attention).
No one here is claiming that PV cells play an insignificant role, or that emergent peripheral challenges will not be met with skill. The claim I am making is that the simple model (more PVs!) is insufficient to address the complex problems human society faces, and that it is naive to believe otherwise. You would never just put your foot on the pedal to drive to your destination; you'll also grasp the steering wheel, reckon with obstacles and roadway laws, etc; but if you have never driven a car before, you might sincerely believe that all it takes is stepping on that pedal.
> but if you have never driven a car before, you might sincerely believe that all it takes is stepping on that pedal.
This is not a fair comparison. Installing a PV system with battery storage on my residential or commercial property has minimal societal impact, especially when compared to something like owning a car. I generate and consume my own electricity in a largely self-contained system.
The primary benefit to society is indirect but meaningful: I reduce my reliance on fossil fuels and draw less power from the grid. This eases demand on shared infrastructure and contributes (modestly) to lower emissions.
Importantly, I continue to pay all applicable taxes and fees, so public services and infrastructure investments (like grid upgrades or transmission lines) remain unaffected. My pursuit of energy self-sufficiency doesn’t impose new burdens on society; if anything, it lightens the collective load.
I don't think you understand my argument. The point is not whether or not solar electricity generation is good or bad (it is obviously very favorable). The point I am making is that it is unhelpful to collapse complexity into a simplistic model.
Your discussion on owning battery + PV is illustrative. You are not in a vacuum and certainly are in relationship with the broader world: you paid for the system, you maintain it, you stopped buying something, you inspired your neighbors, you lowered the costs for your neighbors to implement a similar system, you reduced your and your countrymen's geopolitical dependencies, you may have saved some money you can spend elsewhere, you probably developed a working understanding of electricity in homes, your neighbors probably developed a better working understanding of electricity in homes, you are now less liable to extortion/persuasion from fossil fuel companies, you're now more likely to own an EV and reduce urban pollution. The entire point is that you exist in relationship; that is what makes it powerful. Had you simply implemented the PV system + battery without these second order effects (and only gained access to more/cheaper energy) you would have considerably less positive impact. The complex model is the correct working model that describes far more of the dynamics than the simplistic model.
My original point: belief in a single fulcrum when describing societal evolution is flatly misleading.
The metaphor of driving a car is not in opposition to solar; you misunderstood it. The point is, again, that the simple model is insufficient for effectively operating in the world.
Now, why would you have to make this point, as it's close to a tautology? It's likely because we have a lever and don't use it. In that framing your point gets lost, because it doesn't address any issue. So there is a superfluousness at play that suggests this is disinformation, intended to derail the impetus for change. So I guess you need to elaborate and present a synthesis, perhaps mention alternate levers, instead of downplaying the one that's obvious? I don't see any other significant levers, RethinkX says PV + battery are sufficient for virtually anywhere in the world. Grid demands should lessen over time as local generation comes online. The grid becomes a overnight backup charging method.
Let’s upgrade our intellectual rigor here. Do you sincerely believe that “PV + battery are sufficient for virtually anywhere in the world” even when it comes to viral disease, dictatorships and warfare, chemical pollution, deforestation, social epidemics (eg, drugs, social media), housing crises, food deserts, famine, etc?
You might be only considering the energy transition, but it is not as if the original author was strictly speaking of that topic, or as if that is all that matters for humanity on earth.
“I don’t see any other significant levers,” you say? Read from history: how about the great liberalizing effect of the Christian marriage and family policy that broke down filial kin networks and paved the way for markets, universities, and democracies by way of fostering impersonal trust? How about the smallpox vaccine? How about the incredible rise in population and economic activity upon the introduction of potatoes to Europe? How about the invention of ammonium-based fertilizers? This one will rankle some feathers: how about the incredible geopolitical twist and – yes – reduction in atmospheric carbon introduced by the development of fracking (enabling the transition away from coal)? How about the civil rights movement in the United States? The invention of nuclear weapons? Metallurgy? Chemistry? The shipping container? Large language models? Look around and you will see fulcrums everywhere.
Literally look around you, wherever you sit right now, and just consider the vast number of twists and turns that led to the current circumstance. Then imagine someone 500 years ago in Beijing saying something as foolish as, “we just need more movable-type printing, yeah, that will protect us from the Northern invaders, that will completely solve deforestation, that will protect us from famine… Hey you farmer over there, stop farming! We have movable-type printing! We’re good, we just need more of it!”
The simplistic model is very appealing; it is easy to wrap your mind around it, it is easy to communicate via viral essay, it is easy to develop optimism upon it. But it is not a working model. It is just too simple and incomplete. The various fulcrums I pulled out of my imagination above all worked because the world was complex. The people who invented and developed those fulcrums were effective because they embraced a complex model. They made the intellectually rigorous choice to reject naive simplicity when others tried to thrust it upon them.
> I'm sure that 10x the solar electricity output would substantially incentivize battery development and changes in industrial production, eventually producing major cultural implications
> Go on 10x'ing the presence of PVs until you find emerging constraints.
While true, I think it's fair to make certain guesses about other tech also being developed (such as, as you mentioned, batteries).
Even if they did not exist, constraints lead to conflicts, and conflicts can lead to exchanges of power.
(Different topic but same idea, constraint and conflict: when it comes to the never-ending battle of encryption, I do not see how to square the unstoppable force of "unbreakable encryption is very easy to make and vitally important to the use of the internet" with the immovable object that is "no state can survive when conspiracies are opaque to investigations and prosecutions").
You only have to change every car, truck, tractor, water heater, clothes dryer, lawn mower, leaf blower, stove top, etc to be electric instead of using natural gas (ie electrfy everything), which likely requires all the changes that the parent mentioned. Also, not everyone has enough land to install enough PV to power their entire homes + transportation, so a lot of this is going to have to come from the grid, which requires changes in transmission which are being actively blocked by the current administration (see Grain Belt Express).
This is another way of saying "EVs are getting cheaper," so it's hard to understand why this is framed negatively.
Moreover, EV batteries are recyclable. The main thing holding back lithium recycling has been the supply chain of used batteries, because the batteries are quite durable.
If the resale value of EVs is falling, that makes it easier to extract the batteries and use the raw material to build better batteries.
On your computer, do you inspect the details of a file using Explorer? On the Mac do you do that with the Finder. Or do you actually open the file with an application?
Do you expect to use Windows explorer or the Finder to “convert file types”?
Using iOS 26 on my phone, I held down a file and there is an “Open With” option that gave me a choice of how to open the file.
Across applications? Applications these days save files using the File dialog, they may by default store them in a folder accesible by Files. Yes I know some apps still store their data in their own sandbox. But that’s not the case generally for standard productivity apps.
If I need to know the details of a file (eg file extension, size, location, etc) I generally use the Finder for that, yes.
I do frequently convert file types through the Finder. Bulk converting a bunch of photos, for example, is easier to do through a file browser. Even if I were opening a different app to do that, a standard file browser would be the interface I would want for that.
It’s great if more iOS applications are storing files as regular files on the filesystem now. Apple should have encouraged that in the first place. There was some goofy notion they were going to get rid of the idea of “files” with iOS, but that’s not actually a good idea.
Before LLMs were mainstream, rationalists and EA types would come on Hacker News to convince people that worrying about how "weak" AI would be used was a waste of time, because the real problem was the risk of "strong" AI.
Those arguments looked incredibly weak and stupid when they were making them, and they look even stupider now.
And this isn't even their biggest error, which, in my opinion, was classifying AI as a bigger existential risk than climate change.
An entire generation of putatively intelligent people lost in their own nightmares, who, through their work, have given birth to chaos.
Weak ai is a problem, but isn't going to lead to 100% human extinction
Human extinction won't happen until a couple years later, with stronger ai (if it does happen, which I unfortunately think it will- if we remain on our current trajectory)
"This theoretical event that I just made up would lead to 100% human extinction"
Neat, go write science fiction.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are currently being lit on fire to deploy AI datacenters while there's an ecosystem destabilizing heat wave in the ocean. Climate change is a real, measurable, present threat to human civilization. "Strong AI" is something made up by a fan fiction author. Grow up.
It can't be true because it sounds like science fiction to you?
Everything about every part of AI in 2025 sounds exactly like science fiction in every way. We are essentially living in the exact world described in science fiction books this very moment, even though I wish we didn't.
Have you ever used an ai chatbot? How is that not exactly like something you'd find in science fiction?
The idea of “Strong AI” as an “existential risk” is based entirely on thought experiments popularized by a small, insular, drug-soaked fan fiction community. I am begging you to touch grass.
From what I can see, Artificial General Intelligence is a drug-fueled millenarian cult, and attempts to define it that don't consider this angle will fail.
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