Furbnow is scaling up residential retrofits in the UK, tackling the 28m homes that make up a third of UK carbon emissions. We are making homes more comfortable, more sustainable and cheaper to run.
We’ve just spun out of the Founders Factory Venture Studio with backing from Nesta. We are 4 right now and will be 13 by the end of the year.
I need your help building out our customer platform in Django + HTMX / react, creating our data services and our internal tools to manage our supplier marketplace of retrofit professionals and installers who carry out the works.
This looks great, congrats - it’s great to see innovation and creativity in the email space.
I’ve just got through my first week with Superhuman, which I’ve found really productive, particularly the keyboard shortcuts. Your marketing copy seemed to make a few references to that product if I’m not mistaken. Aside from the price ($30/m for Superhuman vs $9/m for Shortwave) would you save me the trouble and outline what you see as key differentiators?
It seems like you’re targeting enterprise / teams which looks great for a work account but less useful for a personal one.
Thanks! Our keyboard shortcuts are pretty extensive too [1]. Let us know if there's a shortcut missing that you'd like to see!
Beyond price, there are a handful of examples [2], but I'll focus on two big things that set Shortwave apart:
(1) An opinionated triage flow. Bundles group together related senders to make your inbox more scannable, while our triage actions (Pin / Snooze / Done) and drag 'n drop allow you to treat your inbox like the to-do list that it is. [3] We lean into the fact that inbox zero is not a realistic goal for many email users.
(2) Team features. We bring Slack-like channels into your email inbox and give you the notification controls to make that possible. [4] Shortwave eliminates the boundary between your team and the rest of the world. And things like emoji reactions, mentions, and a chat-like interface make it feel unlike any email client you've used before.
Bravo to Google for this show of corporate leadership. Their pledge to purchase renewable energy to match their real-time demand really is impressive, especially the note that it must create new renewable generation (discussed on the Google blog announcement not this article) .
It is also prudent, as these long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with new renewable generators will be very competitive, probably much cheaper than wholesale power prices, and be fixed into the future, avoiding price fluctuations from e.g. future gas supply shocks.
I wonder, would it be feasible for them to use wind power to run time insensitive batch jobs in the daytime - crank down the processing power on these jobs when there's less green energy around?
Google has insane optimization for power consumption at data centers, if there is something you can think of, they will have either done it or will be trying it.
For many a datacenter - balancing the loads across the three-phase power supply is one area that makes one of, if not the biggest difference in the bill/power charged for using. Though that for many a tech, is an area they are more inclined to overlook.
Then quality of the power (clean sine or noise spikes) auditing, then the factor that UPS's do square wave. Though that's more stability and indeed longevity of your kit plugged that appreciates those nuances.
It is one big rabbit hole and can imagine the likes of Google having dedicated teams to focus just on power optimisations as the dividends at that scale - more than pay for the team.
When you deploy a datacenter at this scale you contract for an amount of power and you're basically obligated to use it. The trick is to get more compute out of the same amount of power.
By the way if you still have AC UPS systems that is probably your #1 problem and you definitely will not benefit from some fancy machine learning thing. Just get rid of most of your AC systems. For example you may benefit by adopting Open Rack 48V-to-point-of-load scheme that uses an in-rack DC UPS.
Total, more the company inhouse data center type affairs - big, but not your cloud or google size affairs. Then doing one AC to DC conversion instead of all that overhead per system along with the associated heat and centralising - pays for itself.
The cut-off for that level of work I'd say is if you design your own servers over just speccing from a vendor level is when you would be doing this. Upto that, it's still vendor off shelf. Though been a while and an option some vendors may now offer at lower scales these days.
Do they openly share these advances & techniques? I know, it's a competitive advantage so I wouldn't fault them too much if they don't, I'm just curious.
I wonder if preemptible instances could be priced or available this way. They could choose to run idle or contract in case of expensive or dirty power.
(1) Existing power usage doesn't work that way. You're basically on the hook for a predicable amount of usage. Of course, this could change, but the inertia behind this paradigm is high.
(2) Google has a bunch of hardware with relatively fixed costs that they'd prefer to run 24 hrs/day, 365 days/year.
A big challenge for Google, and any large DC operators in general, is utilization. Ideally you want the entire fleet working at 100% all the time, so there's no real benefit to ramping up or down with energy supply.
> avoiding price fluctuations from e.g. future gas supply shocks.
Yes, especially in Europe where the dominant natural gas supplier, Russia, has shown itself more than willing to use their position as a political hammer. And I know, that's not just a Russia issue, other countries do the same, they're just the most applicable when talking about gas in Europe.
The folk building Lightyear One [0], a fully solar powered prototype car, would disagree with the assertion that it is off limits for now. Obviously the car is quite different from a Prius or any other modern car.
I would be very surprised if that car could meet crash-test standards to be sold at large scale. If you don't have to meet crash test standards, you can make a much lighter car than you can today.
Disclaimer: I helped create those Carbon Tracker graphs.
> - The author states that renewables are on the verge of being "cheaper than the cost of continuing to operate existing coal- or gas-fueled power plants". They support this argument with some cherry-picked examples. Realistically, that is not true, nor will it likely every be true.
In the case of coal, it certainly is true in many regions. Natural gas I agree is quite different, particularly given the role it will play providing flexible capacity as renewables penetrate further. But across Europe new renewables are cheaper to build than to operate existing coal, due to ageing fleets, tightening air pollution regulations and the carbon price. Same for the US, except without the carbon price. [*edit - And obviously the rapid cost reductions in renewables!]. And we see quite strong trends for Asia, SEA etc.
You can find more detail on the coal trajectories in our global report, Powering Down Coal and online portal [0].
However, you really cannot compare coal to renewables directly, since it's an apples to oranges type comparison. If you include externalities like a carbon tax in the cost curves then the you really need to understand the nuances to properly interpret those graphs.
I should have said please keep the nuances in mind when trying to interpret the graphs, and thank you for your efforts!
Regarding the technology comparison, that is true from a power system point of view - but for a utility which is making investment decisions in new generation capacity, it isn't so different. We include carbon taxes because coal power operators suffer that tax, it isn't an assumption about future policies. And equally to someone else's question about whether subsidies are included in solar costs, the answer is no. Because the LCOE is calculated from current module, balance of system and soft costs, and that while subsidies have brought the costs down, they aren't a component of the LCOE. As for system costs which perhaps you are referring to, that is fair from the system viewpoint but not particularly for the marginal unit of new capacity. UKERC have done some good research in the UK on system costs of renewables integration which perhaps you are referring to [0].
But you're absolutely right that there is a lot of nuance, especially around regional power market differences.
> but for a utility which is making investment decisions in new generation capacity, it isn't so different.
You are probably familiar with all of this, but that's a tricky one since dispatchability puts those into different equivalence classes. California ISO has negative LMPs right now, which means building additional solar provides little marginal value to the utility. As a result, even if the "traditional" LCOE for solar (just using capital cost, O&M, and capacity factor) is lower than coal, coal would technically still have higher value to the utility.
You'd have to model real-time demand and fratricide to get a average marginal rate (almost impossible to predict for a 20-30 year horizon right now, given rate of innovation), and then compare that against the amortized capital cost and O&M to get an expected ROI for the plant. An LCOE comparison wouldn't really make sense from a decision making standpoint.
That wouldn't be true if they were both closely equivalent (say NGCC vs NGCT, or coal vs nuclear). Then a strict LCOE comparison would be useful.
Fair point about California's negative LMPs, but I think for a lot of regions in the US there is still a lot of room for renewable growth.
But it is fair to compare LCOEs because solar usually gets its value through long-term PPAs; either utility to generator, or even through the rate-base, and the price of that is effectively set by the LCOE. Despite missing out a lot of the other factors that you reasonably bring up, from system costs to locational factors.
Furbnow is scaling up residential retrofits in the UK, tackling the 28m homes that make up a third of UK carbon emissions. We are making homes more comfortable, more sustainable and cheaper to run.
We’ve just spun out of the Founders Factory Venture Studio with backing from Nesta. We are 4 right now and will be 13 by the end of the year.
I need your help building out our customer platform in Django + HTMX / react, creating our data services and our internal tools to manage our supplier marketplace of retrofit professionals and installers who carry out the works.
-> £65-75k + equity
Learn more (https://smrtr.io/cMwnW) or reach out to me Laurence [at] furbnow.com