9 ms·

Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? The power system

by Syonyk 5y ago

Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? The power system on my solar shed is, admittedly, somewhat overkill in an attempt to get through the winter without having to light the generator (so far, I've failed at this, our inversions are nasty). The flip side is that I have quite a bit of surplus power most of the year (on the order of 10-15kWh/day). If I use it, great, if not... it just doesn't get pulled out of the panels. The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie), so when the battery bank is full, there's nowhere to stick extra energy. I've considered various methods to use some of the surplus in useful ways, which so far has looked like donating a lot of compute to various BOINC projects (including cpdn, which is now out of work...). But I've not seen much work in the way of "things that could actually capture concrete amounts of carbon and store them" at this scale. It's all huge facilities, big multinational investment, etc. I've considered an algae grow system that would cycle air through some grow tanks (I have a lot of sun, growing algae in containers is sort of the default around here) and then bury the algae down some holes, but I'm not sure it really accomplishes that much. Another option I've considered is making use of some of the basalt laying around, getting a rock crusher to grind it into powder, and then either spreading it on the hill, or trying to find some sort of more rapid system for weathering it (tanks of water with airflow through them?). Of course, if algae likes basalt... I could combine the two! I just can't find any information on smaller scale systems like this, and I lack the bio and chem background to really be able to do things like analyze rock dust for carbon content.

davidw 5y ago
> Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? Trees? They make efficient use of solar energy to capture carbon and have a lot of other benefits: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuous-cycles-street-trees https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuou...
- Syonyk 5y ago
  If I could grow the things... I struggle to get them watered properly. Practically, though, I'm out in some fairly high desert, and I have to pump water for irrigation out of a deep well. I can certainly do it, but I'm looking for something of a bit more "geologic scale" sequestration, if it's possible.
  - smileysteve 5y ago
    You might consider hydroponics (ie consumer Aerogarden) as the water requirements are approximately 90% less. It does the "watering" for you.
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      I'm actually planning to get a backhoe for a couple years to build a large basalt greenhouse, then do aquaponics - combine growing fish and plants in something that removes most of the downsides of aquaculture and hydroponics. Done properly, it's a synthetic pond ecosystem that doesn't require flushing the water ever.
  - davidw 5y ago
    Looks like you're somewhere east of where I live in Oregon. Do Junipers grow there with maybe a little bit of water?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anonporridge 5y ago
  FYI, it takes 7-8 trees just to offset a single person's breathing if this math is right. https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-trees-does-it-take-to-produce-oxygen-for-one-person/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-trees-doe...
  - hagbard_c 5y ago
    The maths may be right but the thought is wrong since it takes zero trees to offset the whole world's population of air-breathing organisms as all the CO₂ they produce started out as... CO₂. This is taken up by algae and plants, which are eaten by organisms which are eaten themselves until the target organism is reached, which will use the energy gained from consuming the previous hop in the carbon chain, breathing out CO₂ upon which the circle is complete. Had humans consumed fossilised carbon the thought would still be wrong since trees only store the carbon temporarily, eventually it is released as CO₂ when the tree burns up or rots away. This leaves aside the whole discussion on whether there is any need to offset CO₂ from non-fossil sources - which there is not as far as I can see.
anonporridge 5y ago
It's probably not worth the resources to do something like this at such a small scale. It will just never be as efficient as an industrial scale operation.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  I'm sure it won't be as efficient as a large operation, but neither can I get my surplus power to an industrial operation. And I'd happily follow the power supplies - run equipment during the day, when it's clear, not run it at night, etc. I'm already used to using energy based on what's available, this would just be something additional to add into the blend. I've got an awful lot of basalt laying around, though...
iforgetti 5y ago
Mine crypto and donate the money. Minimally you reduce the incentive for others to use electricity to mine more.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  I'm not sure if that holds - wouldn't additional work on the network encourage others to then add more capacity to recapture their share? I've looked into it briefly, and came to the conclusion that the BOINC stuff (it used to be F@H but I gave that GPU to a friend for some CAD work) was more useful than crypto mining, because I simply couldn't mine enough to matter out here - a dollar or less a day sort of thing, with my annual power profile.
Johnny555 5y ago
I have quite a bit of surplus power most of the year (on the order of 10-15kWh/day). If I use it, great, if not... it just doesn't get pulled out of the panels. The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie) I know you said grid-tie isn't worth the trouble, but until the USA moves to more renewable energy for power production, that might yield the best carbon reduction, depending on how much you could otherwise sequester per KWh. The national average CO2 emissions for power production is 947.2 lbs CO2 per megawatt-hour [1] (or 0.947 lbs/KWh). So unless you can sequester 10-15lbs or more of CO2 a day, then you may be better off sending your excess power to the grid if your goal is carbon reduction. Though I'm not sure how to account for the actual CO2 reduction - is the national average fair? Should you use the average per state since states vary widely in their renewable energy status? Is there some other way to determine how much CO2 you've offset? [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
- Syonyk 5y ago
  I guarantee my office is radically more trouble than it's worth to grid tie. I'd have to put a second meter in, or lose net metering on my house, I'd have to trench across an awful lot of quite hostile ground (literal rock outcroppings between "where my office is" and "where the grid tie would be"), upgrade my house's electrical panel, and pretty much entirely redo my office power system from the ground up, get a permit for my office (it's under the size minimum, but with hard wired power it would need a permit), rebuild my panel mounts, and an awful lot of other stuff. It would easily run me $10k to do all this, before I was able to cross tie a single kWh. And, in the bargain, I'd lose the standalone power system that is my office, because getting battery backed stuff approved out here is basically impossible. I tried for the house system, and after 18 months of fighting red tape that exists to fund the red tape, I gave up and built a grid tie system without a backup. I get that it sounds easy, but it would cost more to interconnect it than the standalone system cost in the first place, drop me out of a very sweet 25 year net metering grandfathering, and leave me with a far less capable property in the deal. Sorry, just not interested in that.
  - 5y ago
godelski 5y ago
It's not a great idea, but you can pump air into lime water and it'll turn into calcium carbonate. Basaltic rock will also form calcium carbonate when CO2 infused water is passed through it. I'm not sure these work at such small scales, but it could at least give you a starting point and a project. If you start a blog about these experiments I'd love to follow. Hard to know if your operating emissions would be offset by your sequestration. If anyone has better ideas I'd also like to know. There could also be a monetary reason to do carbon capture at home. There can be a lot of CO2 buildup in homes and offices with poor ventilation (read: most).
- Syonyk 5y ago
  If I do any experimentation, it would be over at my normal blog. My operating emissions, if powered by my office, are zero incremental emissions - the system is overpaneled and there's no cost for extra production within the bounds of what it can do.
prawn 5y ago
I know nothing about the practicalities, but could you run grow lights and head pads to raise seedlings and hydroponic food and then donate to the neighbourhood? Meagre, but might save on some tiny transport cost somewhere.
k_sze 5y ago
If only there’s a market network for quick-swappable rechargeable battery packs for electric cars. Here’s how it would work: you pass by a convenience store or gas station on your way home or to work, pick up some depleted battery packs, you get home and recharge those battery packs with your excess solar power, then bring the recharged battery packs back to convenience store or gas station for a bit of money. That way you don’t need to grid tie your solar installation. :P
- gibolt 5y ago
  A grid (even if local) is far more efficient. Moving things takes a lot of energy. It would be more efficient to just put those batteries in the grid, since everyone will be generating surplus at the same time, and it would never be unutilized while disconnected.
- Sophistifunk 5y ago
  So, your answer to global warming is to move already-generated electricity via truck, instead of wires?
- thinkcontext 5y ago
  There are such picker/chargers for the electric scooters available in many cities.
elihu 5y ago
I don't know if there's any sane way to do this on a small scale and without concentrated CO2, but the first thing that comes to mind is to make synthetic methane using a Sabatier process. I think the way this works is you create hydrogen through electrolysis of water, and then react it CO2 to make methane. Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, but if you burn it as fuel it's a carbon-neutral energy source. Alternatively, you could use electrolysis to make hydrogen, but hydrogen is harder to store. (I'm not a chemist, so I have no idea if this could work. And it probably wouldn't be very practical even if it did.) I do like your idea of experimenting with a rock crusher. The article mentions that finding the least-energy means of crushing rocks to the appropriate size is something of an open problem.
- IntrepidWorm 5y ago
  What purpose would the methane serve? Assuming it's possible to use this process on a home scale with a decent solar grid and energy storage, it seems to me that you would be sequestering the carbon only very temporarily. Wouldn't the electrical energy used to produce the methane heat your home more efficiently (assuming you have an electric heating system) as you would be inviting energy losses through the Sabatier process? Seems you would need to produce industrial levels of methane and distribute it (which would almost certainly be carbon expensive in it's own right) as substitute for naturally occuring methane being extracted from deposits. It's a cool idea though. If there were a process to produce solid carbon, this would be much more promising (disclaimer: definitely not a chemist).
  - elihu 5y ago
    The general idea is you can make methane that's equivalent to the methane that comes out of the ground, but in a carbon neutral way. So it's a benefit if you can give it someone who was going to burn methane anyways, like to run their natural gas furnace. That's not as satisfying as just plain sequestering the carbon somehow. I mean, it would almost certainly be better to just run an extension cord to a neighbors house and let them run an electric space heater or heat pump off of the excess electricity. Maybe methane could be used as an ingredient to make something else that's possible to store or bury long term, like some kind of plastic or liquid? (Most of what I know about the processing of hydrocarbons is probably wildly inaccurate because I learned it from Factorio.)
LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
I have a mind-blowing idea. Don't have children...? Birth rate decrease -> demand decrease -> CO2 decrease If we have the same birth rate as Korea or Japan, the population would drop more than 20% in 50 years according to the population prediction in these two countries. This means lots of demand would not need anymore, and might be the best practice which could be done by individual.
- adrianN 5y ago
  We don't have to reduce carbon emissions by 20% in 50 years, we have to reduce them by >100% in less than thirty years. Reducing birth rates is both, much too slow, and not sufficient (unless you propose reducing population to 0).
  - LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
    At least, workable and easy. Is there any solution could really reduce around 20%? (Not to mention more than 20% and not to transfer the emission to other countries)
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Sure, replace fossil fuels for electricity generation with renewables and/or nuclear. Replace fossil fuels in cars with batteries. Replace fossil fuels for heating with electricity. Each of those saves on the order of 20% of emissions and could be done in less than a decade if we put maximum effort into it. I really doubt convincing a sufficient number of people to not have children is easier than any one of those measures. Just imagine the political backslash if the government suggested not to have kids for the climate. It's a lot easier to convince people to stop eating meat for the climate and even that is essentially impossible.
      - LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
        Uh... I replied to OP which is for individual. In the scale of country, East Asia did quite well without any policies (exclude China, they have a special policy on it). Just keep raising the price of estate, and then birth rate would drop and never come back. For the part of energy, according to the EPA report[1], the emissions by electricity and heat are around 25% in total. If we want to reduce 20% in total, we need to close 80% of fossil plants. For me, it is nearly impossible. There are some countries may not have the land or safe area to place nuclear/renewable plants. (e.g. Singapore...) I know there is a plan for Singapore to buy the clean solar energy from Australia, but it only covers 1/5 of the consumption. Also, there must be security issues for transferring power between countries. [1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
nanomonkey 5y ago
You can utilize the excess electricity to gasify waste woody biomass from tree trimming, etc; store the syngas that is produced for heat production during the winter, and bury the biochar (carbon) that is left over build soil health and recapture carbon.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Advocate for more efficient land use requiring less transportation, heating, and cooling. Advocate for increased carbon taxes, extraction duties, and limits on new uses and loads. Encourage wetlands and forest preservation and expansion. Wetlands, by unit area are the most productive carbon sequestering ecosystems on Earth. Grow plants. Compost. Reduce your own carbon footprint. Reduce meat consumption, use of manufactured goods (most especially with high embedded energy content), and energy useage. Reduce, reuse, and recycle, in that order.
sokoloff 5y ago
> The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie), so when the battery bank is full, there's nowhere to stick extra energy. I don’t know the details of your site/situation, but I suspect any alternatives to grid-tying your system will turn out to be a lot less efficient than whatever (mostly one-time) trenching, cabling, and paperwork would be required.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? Gardening. If you garden without fertilizers, and compost garden waste, then you are capturing carbon in the soil. If you use a composting toilet too, you capture even more. If you compost only the garden waste, and only( spread that compost on your garden, then the amount of stored carbon won't increase much, because a lot of what goes into your compost must have come from the soil. But if you also compost food-waste, and if you add soil-conditioners such as farmyard manure, then the amount of stored carbon will increase steadily. But as has been noted up-comment, the easiest, cheapest way to get carbon into the ground is to not dig it up in the first place.
qiqitori 5y ago
Is it safe to just leave the panels in the sun without letting them convert sun energy into electricity? If connecting into the grid isn't possible you could maybe attempt to charge batteries that you then take home and use there. Would require some calculations to check if it's worth it though... Would maybe be best if it were an electric car that can feed back into the grid. Or run a desalination plant ;D

by Syonyk 5y ago

davidw 5y ago

> Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? Trees? They make efficient use of solar energy to capture carbon and have a lot of other benefits: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuous-cycles-street-trees https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuou...

Syonyk 5y ago
If I could grow the things... I struggle to get them watered properly. Practically, though, I'm out in some fairly high desert, and I have to pump water for irrigation out of a deep well. I can certainly do it, but I'm looking for something of a bit more "geologic scale" sequestration, if it's possible.
- smileysteve 5y ago
  You might consider hydroponics (ie consumer Aerogarden) as the water requirements are approximately 90% less. It does the "watering" for you.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    I'm actually planning to get a backhoe for a couple years to build a large basalt greenhouse, then do aquaponics - combine growing fish and plants in something that removes most of the downsides of aquaculture and hydroponics. Done properly, it's a synthetic pond ecosystem that doesn't require flushing the water ever.
- davidw 5y ago
  Looks like you're somewhere east of where I live in Oregon. Do Junipers grow there with maybe a little bit of water?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anonporridge 5y ago
FYI, it takes 7-8 trees just to offset a single person's breathing if this math is right. https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-trees-does-it-take-to-produce-oxygen-for-one-person/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-trees-doe...
- hagbard_c 5y ago
  The maths may be right but the thought is wrong since it takes zero trees to offset the whole world's population of air-breathing organisms as all the CO₂ they produce started out as... CO₂. This is taken up by algae and plants, which are eaten by organisms which are eaten themselves until the target organism is reached, which will use the energy gained from consuming the previous hop in the carbon chain, breathing out CO₂ upon which the circle is complete. Had humans consumed fossilised carbon the thought would still be wrong since trees only store the carbon temporarily, eventually it is released as CO₂ when the tree burns up or rots away. This leaves aside the whole discussion on whether there is any need to offset CO₂ from non-fossil sources - which there is not as far as I can see.

anonporridge 5y ago

It's probably not worth the resources to do something like this at such a small scale. It will just never be as efficient as an industrial scale operation.

Syonyk 5y ago
I'm sure it won't be as efficient as a large operation, but neither can I get my surplus power to an industrial operation. And I'd happily follow the power supplies - run equipment during the day, when it's clear, not run it at night, etc. I'm already used to using energy based on what's available, this would just be something additional to add into the blend. I've got an awful lot of basalt laying around, though...

iforgetti 5y ago

Mine crypto and donate the money. Minimally you reduce the incentive for others to use electricity to mine more.

Syonyk 5y ago
I'm not sure if that holds - wouldn't additional work on the network encourage others to then add more capacity to recapture their share? I've looked into it briefly, and came to the conclusion that the BOINC stuff (it used to be F@H but I gave that GPU to a friend for some CAD work) was more useful than crypto mining, because I simply couldn't mine enough to matter out here - a dollar or less a day sort of thing, with my annual power profile.

Johnny555 5y ago

I have quite a bit of surplus power most of the year (on the order of 10-15kWh/day). If I use it, great, if not... it just doesn't get pulled out of the panels. The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie) I know you said grid-tie isn't worth the trouble, but until the USA moves to more renewable energy for power production, that might yield the best carbon reduction, depending on how much you could otherwise sequester per KWh. The national average CO2 emissions for power production is 947.2 lbs CO2 per megawatt-hour [1] (or 0.947 lbs/KWh). So unless you can sequester 10-15lbs or more of CO2 a day, then you may be better off sending your excess power to the grid if your goal is carbon reduction. Though I'm not sure how to account for the actual CO2 reduction - is the national average fair? Should you use the average per state since states vary widely in their renewable energy status? Is there some other way to determine how much CO2 you've offset? [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...

Syonyk 5y ago
I guarantee my office is radically more trouble than it's worth to grid tie. I'd have to put a second meter in, or lose net metering on my house, I'd have to trench across an awful lot of quite hostile ground (literal rock outcroppings between "where my office is" and "where the grid tie would be"), upgrade my house's electrical panel, and pretty much entirely redo my office power system from the ground up, get a permit for my office (it's under the size minimum, but with hard wired power it would need a permit), rebuild my panel mounts, and an awful lot of other stuff. It would easily run me $10k to do all this, before I was able to cross tie a single kWh. And, in the bargain, I'd lose the standalone power system that is my office, because getting battery backed stuff approved out here is basically impossible. I tried for the house system, and after 18 months of fighting red tape that exists to fund the red tape, I gave up and built a grid tie system without a backup. I get that it sounds easy, but it would cost more to interconnect it than the standalone system cost in the first place, drop me out of a very sweet 25 year net metering grandfathering, and leave me with a far less capable property in the deal. Sorry, just not interested in that.
- 5y ago

godelski 5y ago

It's not a great idea, but you can pump air into lime water and it'll turn into calcium carbonate. Basaltic rock will also form calcium carbonate when CO2 infused water is passed through it. I'm not sure these work at such small scales, but it could at least give you a starting point and a project. If you start a blog about these experiments I'd love to follow. Hard to know if your operating emissions would be offset by your sequestration. If anyone has better ideas I'd also like to know. There could also be a monetary reason to do carbon capture at home. There can be a lot of CO2 buildup in homes and offices with poor ventilation (read: most).

Syonyk 5y ago
If I do any experimentation, it would be over at my normal blog. My operating emissions, if powered by my office, are zero incremental emissions - the system is overpaneled and there's no cost for extra production within the bounds of what it can do.

prawn 5y ago

I know nothing about the practicalities, but could you run grow lights and head pads to raise seedlings and hydroponic food and then donate to the neighbourhood? Meagre, but might save on some tiny transport cost somewhere.

k_sze 5y ago

If only there’s a market network for quick-swappable rechargeable battery packs for electric cars. Here’s how it would work: you pass by a convenience store or gas station on your way home or to work, pick up some depleted battery packs, you get home and recharge those battery packs with your excess solar power, then bring the recharged battery packs back to convenience store or gas station for a bit of money. That way you don’t need to grid tie your solar installation. :P

gibolt 5y ago
A grid (even if local) is far more efficient. Moving things takes a lot of energy. It would be more efficient to just put those batteries in the grid, since everyone will be generating surplus at the same time, and it would never be unutilized while disconnected.
Sophistifunk 5y ago
So, your answer to global warming is to move already-generated electricity via truck, instead of wires?
thinkcontext 5y ago
There are such picker/chargers for the electric scooters available in many cities.

elihu 5y ago

I don't know if there's any sane way to do this on a small scale and without concentrated CO2, but the first thing that comes to mind is to make synthetic methane using a Sabatier process. I think the way this works is you create hydrogen through electrolysis of water, and then react it CO2 to make methane. Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, but if you burn it as fuel it's a carbon-neutral energy source. Alternatively, you could use electrolysis to make hydrogen, but hydrogen is harder to store. (I'm not a chemist, so I have no idea if this could work. And it probably wouldn't be very practical even if it did.) I do like your idea of experimenting with a rock crusher. The article mentions that finding the least-energy means of crushing rocks to the appropriate size is something of an open problem.

IntrepidWorm 5y ago
What purpose would the methane serve? Assuming it's possible to use this process on a home scale with a decent solar grid and energy storage, it seems to me that you would be sequestering the carbon only very temporarily. Wouldn't the electrical energy used to produce the methane heat your home more efficiently (assuming you have an electric heating system) as you would be inviting energy losses through the Sabatier process? Seems you would need to produce industrial levels of methane and distribute it (which would almost certainly be carbon expensive in it's own right) as substitute for naturally occuring methane being extracted from deposits. It's a cool idea though. If there were a process to produce solid carbon, this would be much more promising (disclaimer: definitely not a chemist).
- elihu 5y ago
  The general idea is you can make methane that's equivalent to the methane that comes out of the ground, but in a carbon neutral way. So it's a benefit if you can give it someone who was going to burn methane anyways, like to run their natural gas furnace. That's not as satisfying as just plain sequestering the carbon somehow. I mean, it would almost certainly be better to just run an extension cord to a neighbors house and let them run an electric space heater or heat pump off of the excess electricity. Maybe methane could be used as an ingredient to make something else that's possible to store or bury long term, like some kind of plastic or liquid? (Most of what I know about the processing of hydrocarbons is probably wildly inaccurate because I learned it from Factorio.)

LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago

I have a mind-blowing idea. Don't have children...? Birth rate decrease -> demand decrease -> CO2 decrease If we have the same birth rate as Korea or Japan, the population would drop more than 20% in 50 years according to the population prediction in these two countries. This means lots of demand would not need anymore, and might be the best practice which could be done by individual.

adrianN 5y ago
We don't have to reduce carbon emissions by 20% in 50 years, we have to reduce them by >100% in less than thirty years. Reducing birth rates is both, much too slow, and not sufficient (unless you propose reducing population to 0).
- LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
  At least, workable and easy. Is there any solution could really reduce around 20%? (Not to mention more than 20% and not to transfer the emission to other countries)
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Sure, replace fossil fuels for electricity generation with renewables and/or nuclear. Replace fossil fuels in cars with batteries. Replace fossil fuels for heating with electricity. Each of those saves on the order of 20% of emissions and could be done in less than a decade if we put maximum effort into it. I really doubt convincing a sufficient number of people to not have children is easier than any one of those measures. Just imagine the political backslash if the government suggested not to have kids for the climate. It's a lot easier to convince people to stop eating meat for the climate and even that is essentially impossible.
    - LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
      Uh... I replied to OP which is for individual. In the scale of country, East Asia did quite well without any policies (exclude China, they have a special policy on it). Just keep raising the price of estate, and then birth rate would drop and never come back. For the part of energy, according to the EPA report[1], the emissions by electricity and heat are around 25% in total. If we want to reduce 20% in total, we need to close 80% of fossil plants. For me, it is nearly impossible. There are some countries may not have the land or safe area to place nuclear/renewable plants. (e.g. Singapore...) I know there is a plan for Singapore to buy the clean solar energy from Australia, but it only covers 1/5 of the consumption. Also, there must be security issues for transferring power between countries. [1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

nanomonkey 5y ago

You can utilize the excess electricity to gasify waste woody biomass from tree trimming, etc; store the syngas that is produced for heat production during the winter, and bury the biochar (carbon) that is left over build soil health and recapture carbon.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Advocate for more efficient land use requiring less transportation, heating, and cooling. Advocate for increased carbon taxes, extraction duties, and limits on new uses and loads. Encourage wetlands and forest preservation and expansion. Wetlands, by unit area are the most productive carbon sequestering ecosystems on Earth. Grow plants. Compost. Reduce your own carbon footprint. Reduce meat consumption, use of manufactured goods (most especially with high embedded energy content), and energy useage. Reduce, reuse, and recycle, in that order.

sokoloff 5y ago

> The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie), so when the battery bank is full, there's nowhere to stick extra energy. I don’t know the details of your site/situation, but I suspect any alternatives to grid-tying your system will turn out to be a lot less efficient than whatever (mostly one-time) trenching, cabling, and paperwork would be required.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? Gardening. If you garden without fertilizers, and compost garden waste, then you are capturing carbon in the soil. If you use a composting toilet too, you capture even more. If you compost only the garden waste, and only( spread that compost on your garden, then the amount of stored carbon won't increase much, because a lot of what goes into your compost must have come from the soil. But if you also compost food-waste, and if you add soil-conditioners such as farmyard manure, then the amount of stored carbon will increase steadily. But as has been noted up-comment, the easiest, cheapest way to get carbon into the ground is to not dig it up in the first place.

qiqitori 5y ago

Is it safe to just leave the panels in the sun without letting them convert sun energy into electricity? If connecting into the grid isn't possible you could maybe attempt to charge batteries that you then take home and use there. Would require some calculations to check if it's worth it though... Would maybe be best if it were an electric car that can feed back into the grid. Or run a desalination plant ;D