Eh, not quite.
Sometimes electricity is so cheap that we could be giving it away for free. This and other techniques could be used to store excess energy for when we need it later.
Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline
fubarx@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
It takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline.
We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume!
potatogamer@ttrpg.network 17 hours ago
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Also it’s a carbon sink if you barrel it up and bury it
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
What’s the alternative? Turning down production when demand is lower than supply or try to out it into batteries.
So you can either do nothing, or use the capacity you’d otherwise waste. Then it comes down to which is a better / cheaper storage method: building batteries, or something that turns that extra power I to some that can be easily stored/used later.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
And that’s just their target, not actual.
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
The company themselves even state that this is supposed to be driven by solar/wind, otherwise it makes no sense. This is regular PtX but in SFF for modular small scale deployment.
rmuk@feddit.uk 20 hours ago
Yeah, put these in Iceland, Scotland or the Sahara where there’s virtually unlimited zero-carbon power available and they make a world of sense.
cmhe@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Carbon needs to be captured were there is a lot of carbon in the air. So especially around cities with lots of car traffic, or around fossil fuel power plants…
So… It would be better to stop car traffic and fossil fuel power plants first, before doing carbon capture…
Womble@piefed.world 16 hours ago
CO2 doesn’t vary much in concentration by how close you are to an emission source unless you are literally sucking air out of a tailpipe. You might get a 10-20% increase in the centre of a city instead of the countryside, hardly enough to make up for being somewhere with so much energy coming in that they frequently have to curtail it (which could then be used for this instead).
This isnt CCS which cheaply turns CO2 into an inert form of carbon, its an expensive process for turning CO2 into a very useful form.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 12 hours ago
They could route emissions through a system like this directly from smoke stacks, capturing the carbon before it even reaches the atmosphere
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
I didn’t know the machine needed no maintenance and that its own life cycle was carbon neutral. TIL/s
jj4211@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Even then, the value prop is questionable.
It treats sustainable energy dedicated to this purpose as “free”, ignoring the opportunity cost of using that energy directly.
For example, let’s say I decided my solar exclusively to making gasoline. I could get about 14 gallons a month of “free” gasoline… Except my home power bill would go up about 150 dollars a month… opportunity cost would be over 10 dollars a gallon…
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Sure, for a homeowner it doesn’t make sense. But what about at grid scale when there isn’t enough demand for that electricity?
What opportunity cost is there to NOT do it when the power would otherwise be wasted or generation capacity reduced? If anything, I’d say the opportunity cost is of not doing this with over generation on the grid/plant
jj4211@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
How much do we have an over generation problem in general though? I suppose the argument would be that solar is curtailed because they don’t want to deal with the potential for overgeneration, but we already have a number of approaches for energy storage. Their pricing for generating at most a gallon a day is a price exceeding a battery system of LFP that could do a lot more than a gallon of gas. This is ignoring the rather significant potential of Sodium batteries.
So this doesn’t look to be cheaper than battery systems, it looks to be way less efficient than battery systems. The biggest use case as energy storage in general seems to be if you want it to spend a few months (but not too many months, fuel degrades in the tank after all). The more narrow use case is to cater to scenarios where you absolutely need the energy density of gasoline, so boats and airplanes critically so, maybe some heavy equipment. I’ll grant that, but if particularly sodium batteries will be an acceptable approach, it’ll be better than this solution in that very wide variety of circumstances.