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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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