5 ms·

Surprising New Renewable Power Source Has 'Negative Carbon Emissions'

55 points by thelastgallon 2y ago

andybak 2y ago
> When the algae perform photosynthesis, they release tiny particles called electrons. Really, Newsweek? Are we doing this now?
- Loughla 2y ago
  Remember that the average American reads at the level of like an 8 or 9 year old. I think it's 4th grade, is what they say.
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    Even as an 9 year old I'd be pretty insulted if someone talked to me like that.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      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.
      - fch42 2y ago
        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.
        marginalia_nu 2y ago
        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.
  - sarchertech 2y ago
    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.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    That doesn't sound right. Are 10 year olds not better at reading than 9 year olds?
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  > Just like humans, algae are constantly breathing—but they intake carbon dioxide and release oxygen Yeah this isn't great.
  - amadeuspagel 2y ago
    That's a quote from a co-author of the paper.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      Well, this is way worse.
- tptacek 2y ago
  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.
  - burkaman 2y ago
    This is referring to IBT Media (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBT_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBT_Media), whose CEO currently owns 50% of Newsweek. 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. - https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/04/inside-newsweek-ai-experiment/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/04/inside-newsweek-ai-experim...
    - solardev 2y ago
      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.
    - jszymborski 2y ago
      That might explain why the article says Concordia University in Wisconsin and not Montréal (the article is from the latter)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  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.
louwrentius 2y ago
> a team at Concordia University in Wisconsin developed micro photosynthetic power cells that generate electricity from algae. Cool! But I’m so cynical about this: there are so many cool party tricks you can pull off in a lab. The hard part is making it scale and be economical. And that’s why 99.9% of these stories end with: “and we never heard from them again”. Still I genuinely hope I’m wrong
- szvsw 2y ago
  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.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    It's not really that disjoint, though. Academics spin out companies, and companies employ scientists.
    - szvsw 2y ago
      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!
- jdub 2y ago
  "power cells that generate electricity from algae"... in mice
  - rvense 2y ago
    Maybe specially bred mice that eat algae and put millions of them in little hamster wheels?
solardev 2y ago
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?
- whizzter 2y ago
  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).
  - apothegm 2y ago
    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.
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      Or just go straight to plowing the carbon into farm fields, where it would restore topsoil quality for growing, and water retention.
- jszymborski 2y ago
  Algae can be food stock for aquaculture, it can be composted, it can be turned into bioplastics and thrown down a bore hole, etc...
  - solardev 2y ago
gojomo 2y ago
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.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  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.
  - gojomo 2y ago
    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.
    - marginalia_nu 2y ago
      May not only be the journalists at fault. The scientists (and their university) have a vested interest in hyping up the potential in their work.
- evandrofisico 2y ago
  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.
Seb-C 2y ago
> [...] absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making it a negative carbon emission technology. The only byproduct is water [...] I remember enough of my high-school lessons to wonder what happens to the C in "CO2" if you convert it into "O2"...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sanderjd 2y ago
  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.
  - neallindsay 2y ago
    That sounds like a byproduct to me.
    - wernercd 2y ago
      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?
      - sanderjd 2y ago
        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.
pjc50 2y ago
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 https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/17/7/1749 (found by Googling the author)
- moring 2y ago
  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.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  > 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. The most important part.
  - solardev 2y ago
    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.
- jszymborski 2y ago
  Ha! This article is from Concordia in Montreal, while the newsweek article says Concordia in Wisconsin. When I first saw Concordia, I was disappointed it wasn't the one I knew, but it actually is.
- gojomo 2y ago
  Notable that this paper doesn't seem to make the "only byproduct is water" and "negative carbon emissions" claims of the Newsweek treatment.
Aachen 2y ago
Unclickbaiting the title: 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 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?)
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  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.
  - PaulKeeble 2y ago
    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.
    - yetihehe 2y ago
      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.
      - sfn42 2y ago
        Could potentially be used for something like animal feed, fertilizer etc
  - wernercd 2y ago
    "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.
cess11 2y ago
Since photosynthesis is endothermic it ought to be about as viable as applying this idea for cooling, no?

55 points by thelastgallon 2y ago

> When the algae perform photosynthesis, they release tiny particles called electrons. Really, Newsweek? Are we doing this now?

Loughla 2y ago
Remember that the average American reads at the level of like an 8 or 9 year old. I think it's 4th grade, is what they say.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  Even as an 9 year old I'd be pretty insulted if someone talked to me like that.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    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.
    - fch42 2y ago
      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.
      - marginalia_nu 2y ago
        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.
- sarchertech 2y ago
  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.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  That doesn't sound right. Are 10 year olds not better at reading than 9 year olds?
marginalia_nu 2y ago
> Just like humans, algae are constantly breathing—but they intake carbon dioxide and release oxygen Yeah this isn't great.
- amadeuspagel 2y ago
  That's a quote from a co-author of the paper.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Well, this is way worse.
tptacek 2y ago
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.
- burkaman 2y ago
  This is referring to IBT Media (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBT_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBT_Media), whose CEO currently owns 50% of Newsweek. 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. - https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/04/inside-newsweek-ai-experiment/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/04/inside-newsweek-ai-experim...
  - solardev 2y ago
    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.
  - jszymborski 2y ago
    That might explain why the article says Concordia University in Wisconsin and not Montréal (the article is from the latter)
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
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.

louwrentius 2y ago

> a team at Concordia University in Wisconsin developed micro photosynthetic power cells that generate electricity from algae. Cool! But I’m so cynical about this: there are so many cool party tricks you can pull off in a lab. The hard part is making it scale and be economical. And that’s why 99.9% of these stories end with: “and we never heard from them again”. Still I genuinely hope I’m wrong

szvsw 2y ago
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.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  It's not really that disjoint, though. Academics spin out companies, and companies employ scientists.
  - szvsw 2y ago
    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!
jdub 2y ago
"power cells that generate electricity from algae"... in mice
- rvense 2y ago
  Maybe specially bred mice that eat algae and put millions of them in little hamster wheels?

solardev 2y ago

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?

whizzter 2y ago
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).
- apothegm 2y ago
  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.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    Or just go straight to plowing the carbon into farm fields, where it would restore topsoil quality for growing, and water retention.
jszymborski 2y ago
Algae can be food stock for aquaculture, it can be composted, it can be turned into bioplastics and thrown down a bore hole, etc...
- solardev 2y ago

gojomo 2y ago

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.

marginalia_nu 2y ago
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.
- gojomo 2y ago
  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.
  - marginalia_nu 2y ago
    May not only be the journalists at fault. The scientists (and their university) have a vested interest in hyping up the potential in their work.
evandrofisico 2y ago
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.

Seb-C 2y ago

> [...] absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making it a negative carbon emission technology. The only byproduct is water [...] I remember enough of my high-school lessons to wonder what happens to the C in "CO2" if you convert it into "O2"...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sanderjd 2y ago
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.
- neallindsay 2y ago
  That sounds like a byproduct to me.
  - wernercd 2y ago
    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?
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      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.

pjc50 2y ago

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 https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/17/7/1749 (found by Googling the author)

moring 2y ago
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.
moffkalast 2y ago
> 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. The most important part.
- solardev 2y ago
  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.
jszymborski 2y ago
Ha! This article is from Concordia in Montreal, while the newsweek article says Concordia in Wisconsin. When I first saw Concordia, I was disappointed it wasn't the one I knew, but it actually is.
gojomo 2y ago
Notable that this paper doesn't seem to make the "only byproduct is water" and "negative carbon emissions" claims of the Newsweek treatment.

Aachen 2y ago

Unclickbaiting the title: 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 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?)

sigmoid10 2y ago
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.
- PaulKeeble 2y ago
  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.
  - yetihehe 2y ago
    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.
    - sfn42 2y ago
      Could potentially be used for something like animal feed, fertilizer etc
- wernercd 2y ago
  "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.

cess11 2y ago

Since photosynthesis is endothermic it ought to be about as viable as applying this idea for cooling, no?