this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume!
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.
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.
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 dedicated 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...
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.
Carbon dioxide needs to be captured were there is a lot of carbon dioxide 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. And the purpose of that should be, making the air cleaner. And putting that carbon back into a less environmental damaging state.
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.
Sort of. Wind is very good at stirring things up, but you can still see differences in places where there are a lot of plants (1-2%). This things needs CO2 to function and that means it needs concentration so the more CO2 to start with the better.
Fortunately this is small and electric is something we already move to cities in large quantities. Putting it in a city makes sense - assuming it works and is safe of course.