Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.7terawatt+years tells me " ≈ 4.7 × yearly electric energy production of all nuclear power plants ( ≈ 3.2×10^15 h W )"

Or 14.9 trillion kilowatt hours, which at plausible retail prices of £0.10/kWh is approximately one and a half trillion pounds. Now, who's going to pay for that?



It’s not much on a global scale, given the nature of the problem it would be solving. And if it works we have a nice little renewable power infrastructure as a byproduct

The real problem is people and our near inability to coordinate at that scale


agreed, or even, as demonstrated in parts of this thread, people's inability to come to an agreement on widely-known facts that conflict with their ego defense


I know I’m not the right person to assess the validity, but if there were some consensus among those who are I’d support the expense.


i'm not sure what to recommend. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d1ee0352... is recent, open access, and seems to be well written, but i haven't finished reading it. it includes, among other things, a process flow diagram with theoretical numbers for the calcium loop which gives slightly lower numbers than my own calculations i linked upthread

i did read https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.103990 which is also recent and open access. it is very poorly written and contains a lot of embarrassing factual errors; however, it has a number of specific and hopefully correct numbers about energy costs lifted from other publications which are hopefully more trustworthy. on the gripping hand, none of them that i've tracked down so far report operational energy consumption numbers from an actually built large-scale dac plant

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2982422 is an earlier (02016) survey paper that i also haven't read in detail yet, though it looks good

none of these papers incorporate the awareness that energy costs have just gone through the first big drop in a century and a half, perhaps because that future is not yet widely distributed


sounds about right, though presumably you wouldn't be paying retail if you're setting up shop to terraform the earth. numerous recent ppas provide much lower (wholesale) prices than that; see https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-ppa-prices and https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/merchant-income..., which have numerous prices below £0.02/kWh.

and, as i said, you can probably use solar thermal for sorbent regeneration

note, though, that the number you're using is the theoretical minimum energy used. existing practical technologies, as i said, consume several times more energy than that. it is unlikely that we will ever closely approach this theoretical efficiency

there is indeed a real difficulty in the current human incentive structure where everybody hopes someone else will fix the problem so they don't have to bear the cost themselves. but that's not a question of engineering infeasibility due to resource limits; that's a question of politics




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: