this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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I do wonder if negative/extremely low energy prices is the point where we could/should spin up carbon capture technology.
At the very least we could just have a giant laser beam shooting the free energy (which is essentially captured heat) into space.
At that point simply increase the albedo of earth, it's cheaper and easier
there's probably some way to shoot lasers into space that does some kind of interference thing to the incoming light.
Wouldn't possibly work by nature of light. You can't replicate the phase of photons from the sun because it's blackbody radiation, i.e. very much the opposite of monochromatic and coherent.
It's not really captured heat, though, since the incoming photons are (mostly) not infrared. Solar panels don't cool off the surrounding area directly; they're mostly converting visible light into electricity.
Direct air capture is still really hard to do at scale for thermodynamic reasons. The quantity of CO2 in the air is very low (~420 parts per million), which makes it really challenging to extract. It's much, much more efficient to use the energy we're harvesting to just avoid emitting additional CO2 than to try to capture it, but that's hard to monetize. Direct air capture is mostly a grift/pipe dream at this point.