This section contains a selection of potential ideas relating to the climate. The ideas range from areas where a gap in the market exists, to ideas where there is a definite business opportunity. There are still more ideas to be added, so this section will evolve over time. This is also an early version - I have extensive notes on many of these ideas, and would like to add more details on the more fully-developed concepts where I have them. In the mean time, if you are interested in a particular idea, get in contact, either via email or Twitter, and I'll be more than happy to provide some extra detail.
There are a number of areas that have huge potential, but which I haven't explored in depth. These include:
  • Alternative fuels - biofuels, 'clean' fuels, fuels from DAC
  • Urban efficiency
  • Tracking and management of forests and the carbon they contain
  • Reducing inefficiency and waste in the building industry
  • Incentivising better soil management and lower fertiliser usage
  • Electric and hybrid aircraft
  • Incentivising sharing of private data between companies in industries for mutual benefit
  • Incentivising open research and data on the climate and environment
  • Localised manufacturing
  • 3D printing to reduce material use and simplify manfucture of certain goods
Travel Carbon
The one stop shop for calculating carbon emissions from travelling by any mode of transport
Low Carbon Journey Planner
Plan a journey based not only on price, but on environmental impact
The One Carbon Offset Platform to Rule them all
Unifying and simplifying the complex mess that is carbon offsets and credits.
Blockchain tracking of HFCs
Tracking and removing HFCs safely is one of the biggest single climate solutions there is.
Modular Mass-timber buildings
Combining modular mass timber buildings with customisation to make cheap, custom buildings that sequester carbon.
Low-carbon concrete
Reducing the carbon impact of one of the most widely used building materials on the planet.
Building Automation
Controlling buildings' heating, cooling and more via an automated system can yield big gains in efficiency.
Optimising Wind Turbine design using ML
Using deep learning and ML to reduce the computational cost of modelling wind turbine blades.
Recycling/Recyclable wind turbine blades
The composite materials used for modern wind turbine blades are not recyclable, resulting in an end-of-life waste issue.
Modular wind turbines
Wind turbines are so large now that shipping is a serious logistical concern. Modular turbines could be a solution.
Grid Storage Standard
An open-source standard for building efficient and safe grid-scale storage systems.
2nd Life Batteries
Processing and reusing EV batteries in storage and other use cases.
Hot-swap batteries for vehicles
Hot-swap batteries for vehicles with high uptime requirements, such as agricultural machinery.
Dairy-free milk and cheese
The 'Impossible Foods' approach applied to dairy products
Green Schedulers
Smart scheduling offsets compute jobs to times and locations with more renewable energy.
Automatically Identify inefficiencies in Cloud setups
A tool to monitor your cloud setup, and identify where resources are being paid for but not used, or data not accessed.
Robotic sorting of recycling
Using computer vision and ML to bring recycling sorting into the 21st century.
Standardised Reusable Coffee Cups
A standard model of reusable coffee cup with a deposit fee, similar to the German Pfand model for bottles.
Reusable delivery packaging
Think amazon parcels, but reusable.
UCCs (Urban Consolidation Centres)
A modular system to reduce heavy goods traffic into city centres through the use of logistics centres.
Truck load matching
Offer cheap rates for trucks returning from deliveries, to avoid empty routing.
Multi-modal cargo
Integrating all freight modalities to provide the cheapest and lowest-carbon way to ship cargo.
Fuel from plastic
Breaking down waste plastic into fuels to both prevent landfill waste and reduce the carbon impact of fuel.
Electric Truck Charging
As trucking gradually moves over to electric power, there's a massive shortfall in EV chargers for trucking.
Climate Risk
Become the single main provider of climate risk data.
Tech platform for renewable energy
Facilitating access to rooftop solar, battery storage, heat pumps and other low-carbon technologies.
EV buying service
A software platform to make the experience of buying an EV easier and smoother.
Climate Data Platform
A single API to the world's climate and environmental data.
Kaggle for Climate
Kaggle competitions to solve some of the big unanswered questions relating to climate change and the environment.