And I am trying to foresee where the main disruptions will take place, and if an old fogey with occasional keyboard skills can do something useful and build a business.
The obvious areas like battery technology seem to involve levels of physics knowledge out of my reach.
But some "second order" areas spring to mind
- Solar farm management software - Fleet management transition software - Home boiler - hybrids and replacement
Any other thoughts?
Solar farms are widely distributed and ordinary across the US, but they tend to be in rural areas off the beaten path...I remember my sense of wonder discovering one unexpectedly in west Georgia (the state) only a couple of years ago. And wind turbines? They are everywhere in the western US, but still amaze me.
I'd put it this way, if you knew a lot of truckers fleet management software would not smell like a greenfield. It's older than GM's onstar service.
When it comes to industrial applications, lots of people have been sitting around thinking what's-next for a long time. They work in organizations capable of funding making-it-happen via ROI.
These aren't bicycle-sized-project. Bicycles can be built by as small team (even one) with jigs and brazing rods and a components closet. A salable electric car can't.
Good luck.
- on one hand, can software in general be a definite "plus" on the question? Should we maybe look for solutions that don't involve too much software, as the footprint of everything software (taken widely and including intensive machine learning, for example) is already pretty big?
- on the other hand: assuming software is required "in large amounts", maybe there is room for heavily optimising all the things involved in building and running software.
With the observations above, if I'm interested in continuing to work with software, working on computational efficiency questions could be interesting and possibly useful.
A lot of it is system integration, not greenfield development, but of course all tech work exists somewhere on that continuum