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Comment by shawndrost | Hacker News Reader

Electricity (during sunlight hours) is not the highest grade of energy. California threw away ~32TWh of electricity last year, with renewables at only 19% penetration. You can't give power away at noon in April; this fact is a significant barrier to building new solar. (See "Learning is not enough" and other academic research on that topic.)

We also use fossil fuels as feedstocks for fertilizers and plastics, so there are very important power-to-X applications which don't involve inefficient combustion.

Something like Terraform would probably have to exist in order to transition away from fossil fuels.

(Source: I'm CEO at a startup with a very different take on the same problem.)

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So the argument is take excess solar power turn it into a fuel for use at another time. It's another take on energy storage.

Question for me is how do you make the business model work. Is it a bet that lower cost to produce or bank that carbon tax on traditional fuels makes it more cost competitive? Or in your case is it that downstream users are looking to clean up their supply chain so will look into a contract for that benefit?

To your point everything can't be electricity or alternatively fuels have different use cases. And it's certainly important to have a diversity of power sources especially as fuel has different attributes then electricity.

we aren't very good at storing electrical energy just yet, but we have a couple hundred years of experience storing and using hydrocarbons. I'm sure you can read the pdf someone posted up above and get their take on it.

Exactly, the tl;dr is energy storage, but I feel like it's sort of the Amazon approach. There was an interview where they asked Bezos why books as Amazon's first product, and his answer was basically:

"I read internet usage was going up by 2300 percent a year, so I decided to try and find a business that would make sense in that context."

"Cheap and ubiquitous solar power is coming, what products does the world need in that context to move away from extracting fossil fuels?"

Like a lot of things, current technology probably isn't there yet. But philosophically, if you wait for tech to catch up with your vision of the future, you might find yourself behind.

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