I’m working on Polynomial (https://polynomial.so), which is a small dashboard for key business metrics. It has open source integrations to most popular systems and has Google sheets export in case you want to do something with the data.
As a founder, I really needed a simple place to centralize all those business metrics. Couldn’t find anything that suited my needs (everything was way overkill) and so I ended up building Polynomial.
I am really impressed at how California has scaled up its use of batteries. I remember 5-6 years ago coding on Electricity Maps and seeing almost no storage (link: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO)
Financially it's kind of a no brainer at this point. Myself and a bunch of family members are customers of SDGE and the lowest price anyone is paying is now $0.50/kWh and the highest is $0.91/kWh.
The household paying the latter just installed 15kW of solar panels and a battery bank to cut their costs to the $16/mo hookup fee and it's not even the height of summer yet. It's almost to the point where their backup propane generator is cheaper to run than pay for utility power! The solar/battery installation will pay for itself in under five years assuming no price increases (hah!).
Everyone is building it at every level of the producer/consumer curve.
Maybe it's that I'm not in as sunny an area, but all of the (battery + panels) numbers I've seen tell me I'll see a break-even in 15 years, vs in ~5 if I just have panels.
They did the installation themselves so the only labor they paid for was roofers to reshingle the roof first. I think that significantly changes the calculus.
There was a US tax program last year that cut 30% of costs off of renewable energy projects. I took advantage of it - it brought the project from "will never pay for itself" to "pays for itself in ~3-5 years" due to the way the financing worked out with the tax credit.
I'm in a very sunny area and my break-even based on last estimate was 16 years, because the local electric monopoly charges a huge monthly fee from solar owners even if you consume nothing.
I'd probably be better off disconnecting from the grid fully, but that's riskier in a climate that still has serious winters and would need more planning than I have spare cycles for, and would have more up-front costs.
Ca state destroyed its energy companies by creating cartels through PGE etc. PGE is unreliable, expensive and has such poor quality of service. (Not to mention immense harm they bring to environment by regularly causing forest fires). It is a poorly managed company that works only because of its collusion with Ca state.
I have installed 21 solar panels and I have a propane powered generator. My intention is to eventually move to batteries as well so I can be as independent of PgE as possible.
Does not matter because all of them are essentially run by California's Public Utilities Commission. Everything that these companies can do differently is ultimately decided by corrupt and incompetent people in PUC. All this leads to terrible decisions.
In a world where companies have to keep consumers happy we get better and better products each year. You want meat without killing animals ? You get that too.
In a world where companies have to only make government employees happy you get outcomes that make government employees happy and consumers being treated as shit.
The map seems buggy for Canada. The "Country" map for Canada seems to be wrong, as it looks like it's subdivided into several pieces (as if it was the "Zone" view).
As founder, I lacked a central place to gather all my KPIs. It works by integrating to other data sources you already use (Google Analytics, Plausible, LinkedIn, Google Sheets..)
I had the same thoughts, which led me to build Electricity Maps (https://app.electricitymaps.com) a few years back, mainly to understand the current state of how electricity grids cause CO2 emissions.
Luckily (and with a lot of hard work) it turned into a successful company.
I also worked on some other climate tech products which weren’t as fortunate. I’ve written about past experiences here:
https://oliviercorradi.com/blog/lessons-learned-climate-tech...
Hopefully this can help you a bit on your journey.
Hello,
Olivier here, author of the map and founder of the company behind it. We're working on adding more countries on the map. Check again in a few months and hopefully we'll have more of them!
Hello,
Olivier here (CEO Tomorrow)
Indeed we're running on GCP, using a mixture of Python and Node. In terms of the approach, I suggest checking out our blog (https://www.tmrow.com/blog) and this talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAelZb2ZYwI) which might provide a bit of clarity.
That's a very interesting presentation (the youtube video), I'm glad someone is working in this space.
Somewhat related, the presentation has a lot of math, which illustrates some of the points made in the recent HN discussion of the impact and effects of math instruction in Russia (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941144). Some comments pointed out how French schools rely on math for entrance exams, and this video a clear demonstration of a software startup having a math background. In fact, the startup probably wouldn't exist or even be conceived without the math and modeling of the data they provide.
As a founder, I really needed a simple place to centralize all those business metrics. Couldn’t find anything that suited my needs (everything was way overkill) and so I ended up building Polynomial.