Floating solar farms could make fuel and help solve the climate crisis
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
The sea brings with it storms and waves (as mentioned in the article) but it also brings: saltwater corrosion, barnacles and other sea life trying to live on your equipment, serviceability issues (harder to get to and work on), and more.
There's also the energy needed to extract the CO2 from the water. If you want CO2, we generate concentrated amounts of it on land (like from coal power plants). Why not get that at the source?
We have plenty of flat land in the deserts around the world, and solar farms there are easier to maintain than out on the ocean.
Because building a power plant next to a power plant so the power plant can turn the waste of the power plant back into fuel for the power plant is lunacy. It's easier and cleaner to simply turn the coal power plant off.
Yes, it can be done. The question is if it can be done economically.
> ... we can do big oil rigs on the shelf than in fact we can do solar panels like this with a submerged oil rig as the under-structure.
An oil rig has all the equipment concentrated on a platform, tapping into a concentrated source of energy. The structure can be built tough to withstand heavy use and tough environmental conditions.
The floating solar platform needs to be spread out as wide as possible, and over-building the infrastructure will dramatically increase capital costs.
Overall, I'll be a little more interested in the idea when they've done a year-long trial at sea of at least a small-scale demo system.
Oh, wait, they haven't actually built the hardware yet, this is just a concept? Yeah, thought so.
From some notes: The long range vision is to create an industry that will provide a range of ecosystem services that would supply food, fuel, fertilizer, fiber, farmaceuticals (nutraceuticals). Not just along the coasts, but in the open ocean. Think of it as biorefinery management. An MPA would likely have a 3 month service interval, and 3 year overhaul schedule to deal with things like biofouling that are part of maritime activities.
A one sq kilometer MPA might generate $1 million a year in value from kelp, maybe another $1 million a year from fish. The fish part is an unknown.
The best way to ride out an ocean storm is to submerge, like whales do. They could adjust bouyancy of an MPA if satellites tell them a storm is coming.
They intend to use mesoscale ocean current eddy shear levels to move MPA's to different locations in a region (imagine using foils to tack across the difference in current layers speeds, or to keep them circling in a small area, and want to develop cheaper marine vessel navigation automation [This means they won't need to anchor or tether the arrays to the bottom of the ocean]
Just any electrochemical synthesis process is very inefficient, that's thermodynamics and you can't do anything about that
The most dumb and simple electrochemical fuel production process — electrochemical production of ammonia, is nowhere close to commercialisation despite chemical industry trying to do that for more than a century
A much more useful ocean-going consumer of solar power would instead produce ammonia, and release it into ocean currents flowing away from land. Releasing iron oxide dust along with it would amplify its useful effect.
The useful effect would be hundreds or thousands of square miles of additional photosynthesis downstream pulling carbon from the air.
If the unit were also to concentrate CO2 and release it dissolved into the water along with the ammonia, that might speed uptake. The waste oxygen produced along with the ammonia would also be useful dissolved into the current.
Micro-organisms scattered throughout the biosphere are astonishingly efficient at taking up dilute ammonia, and accelerating growth of everything around them.
Ammonia production is the best-fit energy sink for rural wind turbines far from an electric grid. The ammonia is immediately useful to farmers, on the spot, as fertilizer, fuel, and cash crop. Intermittent power causes no difficulty; produce when there's wind, wait when there's not. Kelp farmers would find wind-powered ammonia production equally useful. Unlike solar panels, wind turbines do not block sunlight.
Were somebody to do that, that somebody would assuredly be waiting for that year's Nobel.
For small-scale production, practicalities of providing chemically pure nitrogen and hydrogen may be gating factors, rather than actual synthesis.
Build it in a dessert with high voltage lines
:D
The same thing happens with oil too. It's just that the recycling period is so long that a massive portion of the carbon in the cycle effectively ends up stashed away underground, and the overground ecosystem has time to adapt to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. When we talk about carbon emissions we mean drilling oil and digging up coal increase the amount of carbon in the active cycle and decrease the amount stashed. Yet it's the same carbon the planet has always had, but just with different proportions of it in different phases of the cycle.