166 kW/ton in a sunny place:
1000 square meters/ton in a sunny place:
4 million square meters = ~1000 acres of PV to power. One unit.
Yeah, that’s going to happen. /s “We’re too ashamed of our energy requirements to post them on our page and are well aware they’re dooming this technology until cold fusion comes out” is what I read between the lines on their fluff page.
They claim 4000 tons per year, I did the math on 4000 tons per day. So ~3-4 acres of PV to power, not 1000 acres.
To completely counteract the 37 billion tons per year produced worldwide, and do it with PV only, assuming desert southwest conditions, would require ~30 million acres of PV. That sounds impossibly high, but is only about the size of the US state of Mississippi. 20% of the land area of Texas, on the El Paso side, would be sufficient to keep pace with the entire world's carbon dioxide emissions.
I remain skeptical that this is the most cost-effective approach, as well as skeptical of its ability to scale, but I apologize for crapping on it at first gloss.
Secondly, the solar panels are a bit more liquid than a comparable area of trees, when industrial demand is high, you can route it there, when it's low, it can be working on sequestration. There are some advantages there. Especially considering the atmosphere is fairly homogeneous, but soil in proper condition for forests is less so.
EDIT: Apparently, one ton of CO2 is released by 1000 kWh of electricity:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
So you have a coal plant generating energy and emitting CO2 just for this factory next to it to capture all that CO2 again. Seems more efficient to just not run the coal factory.
It seems like this idea will be worthwhile when the last coal factory closes.
Imagine you have a teaspoon of salt and a cup of water.
Adding salt into the water is dead simple and requires little energy. Now how hard is it to remove that teaspoon of salt?
That's effectively what's happening with the atmosphere.