Photosynthesis could generate electricity while absorbing CO2
(according to the article. Using "could and would" because it doesn't seem to have been built, only modeled/computed/predicted. The paper linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40668458 does not mention the absorbing aspect if I'm skimming the conclusion right but maybe it's implied because plants are known to take carbon from the atmosphere?)
From the paper it seems like they did build a demonstrator to test their model. This is of course very far from a practical power supply, but you can definitely scratch the could. The only question is how this scales.
And its actual practical power output and CO2 absording properties. Also with anything biological like this we want to know how long it lasts and what sort of maintenance is required, sounds like we have to dump a lot of algae somewhere since its growing.
If we want this to be at least remotely effective, we would have to dump some gigatonnes of algae somewhere. That's a LOT of organic matter just waiting to decay into methane etc.
"the question is how it scales" and which mega corp is going to buy and bury the tech.
But seriously... stuff like this ("ZOMG MIRACLE BATTERY! MIRACLE SOLUTION! ZOMG!) seem to disappear because it takes years to turn an idea into a demo... and longer to get a demo to market and to scale.
We are surrounded by stuff that followed that route but I hope stuff like this actually makes it to market.
This article is obviously so watered down as to be useless, but the underlying paper seems to be https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/17/7/1749 (found by Googling the author)
> The six µPSCs in series connection have a predicted Pmp of 1079.9 µW.
> A maximum power of 985 µW was predicted with these configurations. In addition, the conversion efficiency of the micro-photosynthetic power cell, which is discussed in this manuscript, has a light input to electricity conversion efficiency of 0.18%. This is smaller in comparison with conventional photovoltaic cells.
Wow, that's tiny. I think solar modules have efficiencies up to 40% these days (47% in the lab), with 20% to 30% efficient modules being very common.
But I guess if land use isn't an issue, the algae could potentially be cheaper on a dollars per watt basis? Floating algae farms in the oceans and such.
Could you find any hint about the "surplus O2" claim in that article? The only thing I found was fig. 1 which seems to imply a cycle which completely turns glucose and oxygen back to CO2 and water, making the whole thing a fancy solar cell without any emitted oxygen.
That’s not true. It’s not that the average American reads at a 4th grade level, it’s that enough of people read at less than a 5th grade level (about 20%) that you have to take them into account when targeting a general audience.
I feel bad for LLMs that get trained on modern publications ("high quality sources", heh), and internalize that this is how people are supposed to talk with each other.
I often wonder how biased we are here. After all, HN is a rather "raw-looking" news aggregator without any of the addictive and suggestive bells & whistles that define the modern internet, and it is therefore reasonable to assume that those who read and post here (aka "us") also converse in ways unlike the population average.
You could also claim I'm saying we're basking in our own elitism to the degree that we're offended by stupidity like that. I'd admit to that feeling. Alas, even if it sounds arrogant, it fits my observation that "most people" would find nothing at all wrong with this sort of meaningless overchildish belittlement of scientific facts.
The HN readership is as entitled to an opinion about writing style as anyone else.
If anything thinking yourself such an intellectual one-punch-man, such an outlier, so many echelons above the common man that a single voicing of your opinions would meaningfully skew the statistics, now that's what I'd consider elitist.
We ought to complain about what we subjectively find lacking, not what we expect some model of the average person will find lacking.
If everyone did that, I don't think it would be possible to make something that is to anyone's liking, as while it's relatively easy to know what you like and want, it is incredibly hard to know what the average person desires.
Electricity is an invisible force that, when harnessed, is able to perform useful work, light up the night sky, and create entertainment like moving pictures on flat panels. Contact your local electrologist for more details.
A reminder that "Newsweek" hasn't existed for over a decade, and this publication is a clickbait farm run by a religious cult that purchased the branding in a fire sale.
They've also started heavily encouraging their reporters to use generative AI, so maybe that line was written by GPT.
> In service of more stories, and faster stories, Newsweek’s AI policy addendum gives staffers the greenlight to use generative AI in “writing, research, editing, and other core journalism functions,” as long as journalists are involved in each step of the process. The original version of Newsweek’s policy stated that using AI for “core journalism functions” required touch points with “three or more journalists” during production. A review of the page on the Wayback Machine shows that line was removed sometime after March 2.
Or maybe it's one of those instances where they SHOULD'VE used GPT but didn't? Explaining things in plain English is one of those things that LLMs are actually really good at, and they have a much broader and deeper science background knowledge than your typical journalist does.
Written journalism is a dying, very low paid job unless you're working at a huge paper (Newsweek isn't). I wouldn't be surprised if GPT could produce better writing (not reporting, but writing), like if you fed it bullet points of reporting and asked it to make a readable article.
The paper linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40668458 doesn't sound like they've developed any power cells, only modeled what their behavior would be, so it's not even "a cool party trick they pulled off in a lab" but "pulled off in a computer"
On the other hand, section 3 iirc is the one where they discuss manufacturing, so there is some thought already going into what you're saying
Yeah scale is always the hard part; but it’s academia’s role largely to turn over stones and see what’s under them. It’s industry’s job to figure out which pathways are actually worth pursuing and which can be scalable/economically feasible. You never know which tech avenue might end up having some odd edge-case use unseen by researchers that ends up being a revolutionary because industry figures out how to apply it in some adjacent domain.
Oh 100% - I am part-time employed by one such company and am currently pursuing a doctorate. I was just trying to point out that it’s always worth it IMO to be trying out all sorts of crazy stuff like this even if it doesn’t pan out as a deployable tech. If it makes sense to spin out the startup, it will happen!
I think the idea seems to be that this uses algae, which "eats" the carbon.
Assuming that's right, then like any other plant-based carbon absorption method, it matters what happens later, whether the carbon is released back into the atmosphere in some form during decomposition, or if it's buried, or whatever else.
The question is what's the circle? for all the "ZOMG You're just burning it back into the sky!" worries - which are legitimate in a sense... this seems like a usable circle where CO2 gets pulled from the air and turned into Carbon, Oxygen and Electricity... then the carbon that's now algea can be turned into more electricity via burning which puts CO2 back into the air sure but now you have a cycle.
The issue with gas/oil/petrol is that the "cycle" is pull from ground and pump into air without a way to pull it back from the air.
So yes, this puts CO2 back into the air... after pulling it out of the air. So how is it not a step forward?
I'd call such a cycle carbon neutral but not carbon negative. Things that are neutral are good, but we also need to figure out how to scale up some things that are truly negative.
Carbon Neutral is the term I was looking for so thank you for that.
Don't give up good in the pursuit of perfect.
If we get a few of these types of solutions - IE Growing algea to pull it from the air and burning it to get electricity and "putting it back"? If scaled? that can be the path forward - especially if we're getting electricity on both sides of the fence.
I'm just pretty allergic to the word "the" in discussions of this, in general. This seems like it could be a useful technology, but no one thing is the path forward.
The path forward is to invent and scale and tweak and improve lots of different things.
Most likely it'd be burned in a bioenergy powerstation.
Drax in the UK [1] is a quite good case study for this (assuming they get it all up and running), though they're not using algae. Right now they grow trees, and burn those in pellet form. It's currently considered sustainable as it's not adding new carbon to the above-ground system (whereas coal/gas/oil is adding to the above-ground carbon). Their next phase is to attempt to capture the post-combustion emissions from their chimney stacks, at which point they have a non-biodegradable mass of carbon to bury somewhere.
Even in that baroque interpretation of sustainability it's surely unsustainable once you include the emissions produced by harvesting, packaging and transporting the fuel.
It's less sustainable than renewables, but fills a practical requirement for peaker style powerplants (which fill sudden demand) without resorting to coal/oil/gas, which are considerably less sustainable. Drax already existed as a coal/gas facility, so transitioning it to a biomass-with-carbon-capture facility is a net benefit to the environment, even when considering the packaging and transportation of the wood, because those steps were required for its coal predecessor.
This writeup neither answers the essential question "where does the carbon wind up?", nor does it link to any more-clear original source or paper about the described research that could answer that question.
That leaves it so incomplete about its topic that the link should be replaced with a better one if possible.
Given how little carbon there is in any practically accessible volume of air, a major obstacle in any atmosphere scrubbing project, it probably doesn't matter. This is likely better understood as a power source that absorbs a bit of CO2 rather than a CO2 scrubber that produces a bit of electricity.
Probably true, which is another knock against the article's professionalism.
But even if the capture negligible, the negative-sign is still interesting - it's teased in the headline! And when a headline teases something, it owes us an explanation of where the carbon goes, a key part of the story to anyone with a middle-school-level understanding of 'carbon'.
Barring nuclear reactions or alchemical magic, it's impossible that "its only byproduct is water". The carbon has to collect somewhere.
Science journalism like this makes its readers dumber.
As it is usual with ALL plants, the carbon is usually used to build plant matter. So the algae in the cells are certainly reproducing, which brings the question of algae growth management. This system can not operate as a closed loop cell, it must continually have water cycled in and excess algae cycled out.
Agreed that's the likely explanation. My objection is that the article elides this, and is false on its facial claim that "its only byproduct is water".
Is it really carbon net negative through the whole lifecycle? What happens to the carbon when the algae dies? What happens when the system gets decommissioned?
For the electricity, it's cool that this works at all, as opposed to turning the algae into fuel. I wonder what the efficiency is, and what maintenance is like. Presumably you wouldn't use something like this for home power, but only at commercial plants that are staffed and regularly maintaijed / gardened?
If algae grows quickly and uses carbon you probably have to remove parts during operation, then there's 2 options, bury it (thus removing it from the loop and becoming negative) or optimally produce cheaper carbon fuel sources, thus we could replace parts of other "biofuels" and reduce the amount of oils we pump up.
I love the idea but I'm highly doubtful of scaling (really wouldn't mind being proven wrong).
A third option would be to use it as animal feed. Then the carbon ends up in sewage (from humans eating the animals) and fertilizer (animal waste), but we were going to end up with those anyway. Tho depending on the specific animals, there may also be methane involved.
Sure, but those aren't free, either from a carbon standpoint or energy inputs or plastics pollution. A solar module, once made, emits no carbon for decades, and can just sit in a landfill (at worst) or have parts recycled (if possible). Algae doesn't live that long and will require a constant stream of waste processing, meaning (probably) fossil fuel trucks and energy intensive industrial processes.
But the algae might be useful in developing countries without solar cell production or import capabilities, if they can scale it up. Some sand and water and you can generate electricity, without significant industry? That'd be very useful.
Photosynthetic power sources would absorb CO2
or
Photosynthesis could generate electricity while absorbing CO2
(according to the article. Using "could and would" because it doesn't seem to have been built, only modeled/computed/predicted. The paper linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40668458 does not mention the absorbing aspect if I'm skimming the conclusion right but maybe it's implied because plants are known to take carbon from the atmosphere?)