The mistake of this article is that it assumes that the cost of energy would be constant for such a large user of electricity. Firstly, the $0.07 industrial price for energy is driven by grid consumption. You're paying for some very cheap, bulk, steady usage production (e.g. nuclear), some very cheap but intermittent energy production like wind, and a lot of very expensive gas/coal production that can be turned on and off. If the load is extremely predictable, or the consumption can be switched off at various times, it should be possible to dramatically reduce the overall price of electricity.

For a simple example, it's usually assumed that installation of 1kW of solar power costs $1000 (of which $200 goes into the panel). Well located, it'll produce at least 5kWh per day over its lifespan of about 20 years. This would produce you power at 1/3 the rate quoted by the article. But, if you were installing thousands of such things, the labour would likely go down a huge amount, and the panels would, too. Imagine the panel costs the same and the labour costs $400 instead of $800. You'd suddenly be at about $0.01-0.02 per kWh.

Let's take this further. Imagine you laid down a 100km/100km area with solar panels - every inch, and somehow you could feed that into your CO2 vacuum cleaner. This would cost you about $50B/year to build and then maintain, but after 20 years you'd have a (average) 2TW power station.

Let's say that sounded like too much work, and you wanted to go nuclear instead. It's claimed a new nuclear power station costs about $5k per kilowatt. That would cost a _lot_ more to build - $160B per year of expenditure to build up over 60 years and not 20 - but the result is the same, you'd have a 2TW power station. Arguably with a nuclear power station, if you were building a really big one, you'd use the same designs and it'd get much cheaper as a consequence.

According to the calculations in the article, that would be enough (with the carbon vacuum cleaner) to suck up about 1.5 megatonnes of CO2 per hour, or roughly the same amount as the US produces each year.

It'd be a frighteningly complex project, but at least the cost in terms of power alone comes out cheaper than covid or the Ukraine war, right?