Surprising New Renewable Power Source Has 'Negative Carbon Emissions'
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
Photosynthetic power sources would absorb CO2
or
Photosynthesis could generate electricity while absorbing CO2
(according to the article. Using "could and would" because it doesn't seem to have been built, only modeled/computed/predicted. The paper linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40668458 does not mention the absorbing aspect if I'm skimming the conclusion right but maybe it's implied because plants are known to take carbon from the atmosphere?)
But seriously... stuff like this ("ZOMG MIRACLE BATTERY! MIRACLE SOLUTION! ZOMG!) seem to disappear because it takes years to turn an idea into a demo... and longer to get a demo to market and to scale.
We are surrounded by stuff that followed that route but I hope stuff like this actually makes it to market.
> A maximum power of 985 µW was predicted with these configurations. In addition, the conversion efficiency of the micro-photosynthetic power cell, which is discussed in this manuscript, has a light input to electricity conversion efficiency of 0.18%. This is smaller in comparison with conventional photovoltaic cells.
The most important part.
But I guess if land use isn't an issue, the algae could potentially be cheaper on a dollars per watt basis? Floating algae farms in the oceans and such.
When I first saw Concordia, I was disappointed it wasn't the one I knew, but it actually is.
Really, Newsweek? Are we doing this now?
You could also claim I'm saying we're basking in our own elitism to the degree that we're offended by stupidity like that. I'd admit to that feeling. Alas, even if it sounds arrogant, it fits my observation that "most people" would find nothing at all wrong with this sort of meaningless overchildish belittlement of scientific facts.
If anything thinking yourself such an intellectual one-punch-man, such an outlier, so many echelons above the common man that a single voicing of your opinions would meaningfully skew the statistics, now that's what I'd consider elitist.
We ought to complain about what we subjectively find lacking, not what we expect some model of the average person will find lacking.
If everyone did that, I don't think it would be possible to make something that is to anyone's liking, as while it's relatively easy to know what you like and want, it is incredibly hard to know what the average person desires.
They've also started heavily encouraging their reporters to use generative AI, so maybe that line was written by GPT.
> In service of more stories, and faster stories, Newsweek’s AI policy addendum gives staffers the greenlight to use generative AI in “writing, research, editing, and other core journalism functions,” as long as journalists are involved in each step of the process. The original version of Newsweek’s policy stated that using AI for “core journalism functions” required touch points with “three or more journalists” during production. A review of the page on the Wayback Machine shows that line was removed sometime after March 2.
- https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/04/inside-newsweek-ai-experim...
Written journalism is a dying, very low paid job unless you're working at a huge paper (Newsweek isn't). I wouldn't be surprised if GPT could produce better writing (not reporting, but writing), like if you fed it bullet points of reporting and asked it to make a readable article.
Yeah this isn't great.
Cool! But I’m so cynical about this: there are so many cool party tricks you can pull off in a lab.
The hard part is making it scale and be economical. And that’s why 99.9% of these stories end with: “and we never heard from them again”.
Still I genuinely hope I’m wrong
On the other hand, section 3 iirc is the one where they discuss manufacturing, so there is some thought already going into what you're saying
I remember enough of my high-school lessons to wonder what happens to the C in "CO2" if you convert it into "O2"...
Assuming that's right, then like any other plant-based carbon absorption method, it matters what happens later, whether the carbon is released back into the atmosphere in some form during decomposition, or if it's buried, or whatever else.
The issue with gas/oil/petrol is that the "cycle" is pull from ground and pump into air without a way to pull it back from the air.
So yes, this puts CO2 back into the air... after pulling it out of the air. So how is it not a step forward?
Don't give up good in the pursuit of perfect.
If we get a few of these types of solutions - IE Growing algea to pull it from the air and burning it to get electricity and "putting it back"? If scaled? that can be the path forward - especially if we're getting electricity on both sides of the fence.
The path forward is to invent and scale and tweak and improve lots of different things.
Drax in the UK [1] is a quite good case study for this (assuming they get it all up and running), though they're not using algae. Right now they grow trees, and burn those in pellet form. It's currently considered sustainable as it's not adding new carbon to the above-ground system (whereas coal/gas/oil is adding to the above-ground carbon). Their next phase is to attempt to capture the post-combustion emissions from their chimney stacks, at which point they have a non-biodegradable mass of carbon to bury somewhere.
[1] https://www.drax.com/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy/
That leaves it so incomplete about its topic that the link should be replaced with a better one if possible.
But even if the capture negligible, the negative-sign is still interesting - it's teased in the headline! And when a headline teases something, it owes us an explanation of where the carbon goes, a key part of the story to anyone with a middle-school-level understanding of 'carbon'.
Barring nuclear reactions or alchemical magic, it's impossible that "its only byproduct is water". The carbon has to collect somewhere.
Science journalism like this makes its readers dumber.
The problem isn't where the C goes, it's the dismal efficiency
For the electricity, it's cool that this works at all, as opposed to turning the algae into fuel. I wonder what the efficiency is, and what maintenance is like. Presumably you wouldn't use something like this for home power, but only at commercial plants that are staffed and regularly maintaijed / gardened?
I love the idea but I'm highly doubtful of scaling (really wouldn't mind being proven wrong).
But the algae might be useful in developing countries without solar cell production or import capabilities, if they can scale it up. Some sand and water and you can generate electricity, without significant industry? That'd be very useful.