"This giant bubble on the island of Sardinia holds 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. But the gas wasn’t captured from factory emissions, nor was it pulled from the air. It came from a gas supplier… “The facility compresses and expands CO2 daily in its closed system, turning a turbine that generates 200 megawatt-hours of electricity, or 20 MW over 10 hours.”

  • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    OK, so you don’t have fossil-fuel-free solutions, either, and you don’t have a reasonable plan to handle night time energy needs. You specifically said that utilizing fossil fuels at all was an issue, including for production of renewable, with the claim about not being able to source a turbine without fossil fuel use. It sounds like you don’t understand that “night” happens during normal human waking hours, that there are actual activities and demand for energy specifically at night, and that there is no direct path to a fossil-fuel-free energy solution. I have no idea how subsidizing alternates erases fossil fuels for your idea.

    Its the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and I have 8.5 hours of daylight today. That’s about 4 hours of decent solar production without clouds, since the sun is so low. I guess I’ll just try sleeping, without electric heat (since CNG is a fossil and solar is dormant), for 14 hours tonight from dusk to dawn (5pm-7am). Wait, solar panels are still using fossil fuels for production, so those are out. Is a wood stove OK? It’s renewable, but it’s a major CO2 burden, much worse than CNG. Can’t mine lithium or nuclear material with the existing industry, all runs on petroleum. I’m not sure if life is worth living, as every waking hour has been spent at work, using the small time frame to try to support myself financially.

    This also means no activity can occur at night. No manufacturing? Triple the facility sizes to allow the “night time” morning shift and the “night time” late night shift to operate with the daytime shift. Can’t go anywhere, can’t entertain myself, can’t eat, can’t enjoy anything other than lying in the dark, waiting for the sun to come back. That’s weird, putting all the overnight demand in the daytime is causing brownouts because we couldn’t triple our energy production. But hey, the burden is being shared and we’re all miserable for 5 straight months. But the summer will be rad with only demanding 8 hours of dormancy.

    Look at the project. It’s not a continuous production of CO2. It says this one contains 2,000 tonnes of CO2 and produces 200MWh/day. A CNG power plant is somewhere in the range of 0.5kg CO2/kWh. That’s 10,000kg CO2 from CNG for 20MWh, or 10 tonnes. In just 200 days, a CNG plant of the same capacity will produce as much CO2 as this entire facility contains.

    Bashing innovative projects like this for being anything less than a time machine to go pure nuclear actively hurts progress. Is that your goal? To maintain the status quo?