Force every new solar panel to come with an attached CO2 scrubber
Posted by dryuhyr@reddit | CrazyIdeas | View on Reddit | 81 comments
What’s the one big downside of solar panels? That they sometimes produce more electricity than you need, and sometimes produce not enough. Electrical companies are charging people with solar for the “right” to dump their excess power into the grid.
Instead, every solar panel should be mandated to come attached to an electric CO2 scrubber. When the scrubber is turned on, it pulls in CO2 from the atmosphere and turns it into carbonates, or black carbon, or some other solid. On a sunny day when you’re not using much power? That scrubber is CRANKING. In the middle of winter? The solar panel barely pumps out enough to keep your battery full.
Solves the problem of energy demand, and those 10-12 billion solar panels start sucking up CO2 in their free time, which reverses global warming within a few decades.
I will be taking no questions
BobbyP27@reddit
Well done, you have just increased the cost of solar power installations to the point where they are totally unaffordable. I guess you'll be needing a new fossil fuelled power station to make up the energy demand.
krupfeltz@reddit
how much does a CO2 scrubber cost? I'm genuinely curious
toochaos@reddit
Well its basically the opposite of burning coal, assuming a coal plant is 50% effecient (its not) you would need 2 other coal power plants to scrub the first co2 emissions. Basically its not feasible technology to reduce c02 to pre industrial levels we would have to use more energy doing that than has ever been made from fossil fuels (which is most of the total electircal energy ever created)
ijuinkun@reddit
This is why the most realistic way of capturing carbon is to plant more trees.
TheBendit@reddit
Trees are pretty hopeless for CO2 extraction. There is not enough land on Earth to cover on trees to extract a significant fraction of current emissions.
Even if you picked something more sensible than trees, like perhaps switchgrass, you are still orders of magnitude less effective than solar panels.
ijuinkun@reddit
Let’s run some numbers:
Mature-growth forests average 100-200 tons of biomass per hectare (100-200 ktons per km^2). Let us assume for the sake of the thought experiment that we can convert 10% of Earth’s land mass into forests. That gives us 15 million km^2, which yields us a total biomass of 1.5-3 trillion metric tons. Live trees are 15-18% carbon by mass, so that gives us about 220 to 550 billion tons of carbon.
Humanity emitted about 35 billion tons of CO2 in 2024, which equates to about 10 billion tons of elemental carbon. That means that our forests would have absorbed the equivalent of 20-50 years of current total emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
https://web.extension.illinois.edu/askextension/thisQuestion.cfm?ThreadID=19549&catID=192&AskSiteID=87#:~:text=What%20percentage%20of%20the%20mass%20of%20a%20tree%20is%20water%3F,-Extension%20Message&text=It%20varies%20by%20species%20and,(oven%2Ddried%20weight).
JustAsItSounds@reddit
You have to bury the trees in the coal mines or its just a temporary carbon sink
ijuinkun@reddit
“Temporary” in this case being the couple hundred years that trees live for, plus the lifespan of any items that you might make the wood into.
Zenith-Astralis@reddit
And stop killing the oceans, since that's what's a lot of the oxygen comes from
ijuinkun@reddit
Yes. Basically, maximize the amount of plant life that is sequestering the carbon. We have cut down at least half of the forests that the world had at the beginning of the Industrial Age. We should be re-foresting any viable land that isn’t being used for something else.
sierrabravo1984@reddit
Smallest I could find is $250-1000 for aquarium to household scrubbers, running at 20-150 watts (with already existing air flow system). If you ran 4 (1 per person) my 400watt system wouldn't cut it. The biggest part of it would be continuing cost of 5g buckets of soda lime at about 2 liters each reaction vessel. One person would produce enough CO2 (1kg/day) for you to have to replace the soda lime every day. (Based on my amateur 2 minute research into survival bunkers)
BobbyP27@reddit
The problem there is that the soda lime you are using to absorb the CO2 is made by roasting sodium carbonate, which releases exactly the quantity of CO2 that the soda lime absorbs, and do you want to guess where the CO2 released by this process goes?
BobDobbsHobNobs@reddit
Outside the environment hopefully
PixelOrange@reddit
What's out there?
BobbyP27@reddit
There isn't really an answer to that question because nobody has made one that does the full process you describe. Devices that extract CO2 from the atmosphere and pipe it out as reasonably pure CO2 gas have been made (very expensive), but a device that, at an industrial scale, can convert CO2 into some solid that can be stored as not really been made (because there is no real commercial demand for that), so a price can't easily be put on it. But it's not going to be cheap, that's for sure.
STFUandLOVE@reddit
That’s not true. The technology exists. Svante. It’s just too expensive to do at any kind of scale that can make an impact.
Kaurifish@reddit
People really don’t appreciate how thin a fluid our atmosphere is and how laborious to seperate one gas from it.
SkiyeBlueFox@reddit
Carbon capture, like desalination, is one of those things where a centralized network is significantly more efiicient/effective than a spaced out one.
Much better to shove the extra electricity over to a single plant to benefit from economies of scale. But then we're back to square one that caused OPs post.
Really the big issue is being charged to dump excess electricity. Imagine if we charged generation companies to add power to the grid. Why are we treating it as waste you have to pay to remove, instead of an asset to be paid for?
FanSerious7672@reddit
Ah I've invented such a device! And have spread them across the world already! :0 can you guess what they are?
KZD2dot0@reddit
Foraminafera, free calcium carbonate on solar, whole continental shelves of them.
g2420hd@reddit
This is an incredibly gay comment
Zenith-Astralis@reddit
Whoa, heck, yeah it kinda is, that's fantastic 💖🔥
RickySlayer9@reddit
It’s a tree isn’t it
Dr-Goochy@reddit
It’s a coal power plant.
BigMax@reddit
It's a coal power plant, but you just flip the switch to run it in reverse! Simple!
FanSerious7672@reddit
Sure is lol
exipheas@reddit
OK Johnny Appleseed...
FanSerious7672@reddit
That's my name don't wear it out!
LoneSnark@reddit
Tree seeds are fairly cheap. They can be had for free at most city parks.
FortWendy69@reddit
Would need to be subsidized by a carbon offset scheme of some description.
Zenith-Astralis@reddit
Don't carbon credits already exist?
FortWendy69@reddit
Yeah. They exist, that’s why I suggested them.
TheBendit@reddit
Yes and they had close to zero effect on CO2 emissions
Laughing_Orange@reddit
That money can be better spent subsidizing clean energy without any carbon capture. Carbon capture won't be economical until we've significantly reduced our reliance on burning stuff to extract energy. We should be working on improving the technology, but I doubt scale rollout will happen before 2050.
FortWendy69@reddit
True
BobbyP27@reddit
Or, perhaps how about, we don't tie atmospheric carbon scrubbing, a very expensive and immature technology, to green energy, a mature, cheap and ever cheapening technology? How about we just take the win on green energy and let the market deploy it at volume?
FortWendy69@reddit
Yeah it’s pretty dumb, but if you had to do it, that would be the way.
HALF-PRICE_@reddit
Also now you have the new carbonates built up and needing to be moved to where and how?
Skippeo@reddit
Seriously, the panels are just getting to the point where they are almost affordable, let's not do something stupid to ruin it.
The_Demosthenes_1@reddit
Yep.
Coal power plant can sell electrons for like $0.0001 and solar is barely able to compete. Adding silly regulations like this causes people from moving away from alternative solutions.
A great source is waste to energy. We have infinite garbage. Burnt that shit. Instead of burrito it in the ground for centuries or even worse dumping it in the ocean so sea turtles can choke on it. Burn it, but scrub the air so we don't have toxis waste in the air and even better separate it so we can burn the optimal shit and bury the super duper toxic stuff. This doesn't work because it's more expense than coal and gas.
Zenith-Astralis@reddit
The better version of a garbage powered furnace is a bio gas digester. It uses microbes to convert most of the burnables to methane, which at least burns pretty clean, but I'm suspect that you could both burn it and keep the CO^2 out of the air while still making net electricity. That goes for a regular methane (natural gas) power plant too.
Also coal was $46/MWh two years ago, and has been getting more expensive faster than inflation since 2021 (the time period the study compared it to).
Source: https://energyinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/Coal-Cost-Update.pdf
geek_fire@reddit
Wait, your contention is that coal is cheaper than solar? Did you just awake from a coma? You're going to be amazed by the cost curve of both solar panels and batteries over the past ten years!
deleted_by_reddit@reddit
[removed]
AutoModerator@reddit
Your post was automatically removed because it contains political content, which is off-topic for /r/CrazyIdeas. Please review the subreddit rules and guidelines.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
epsben@reddit
Instead send the surplus of power to a watertank and make hydrogen via electrolysis and use that in a fuel cell at night to generate electricity.
One-Payment434@reddit
which gives you about 5kwh back for every 10kwh you put in.
you could instead use this surplus power to charge a battery, and discharge that battery during the night, giving you 8-9 kwh back for every 10kwh you put in
deleted_by_reddit@reddit
[removed]
AutoModerator@reddit
Your post was automatically removed because it contains political content, which is off-topic for /r/CrazyIdeas. Please review the subreddit rules and guidelines.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
epsben@reddit
Would storing it as thermal energy be even better?
Not_an_okama@reddit
No. Chemical batteries are the best, gravity batteries are second best (specifically pumped hydro which is ~80% efficient, not sure about other methods)
raznov1@reddit
Can you show me such an "electric CO2 scrubber"? Hmm OP?
No_Report_4781@reddit
Free plants!
beardedbast3rd@reddit
So I have to do more work for my own setup?
Also, your use of the grid has a cost. If the utility doesn’t charge you for back charging the grid, your neighbors are subsidizing your solar installation through their service charges.
If you don’t like that, get a storage system and disconnect from the grid.
LoneSnark@reddit
Sure. We'll include some tree seeds in the box with the solar panels. Or maybe just a post-card to mail off for your free tree seeds.
Possible-Anxiety-420@reddit
I wunner how large and energy-hungry would a device need to be in order to counter, in real time, the CO2 emitted by a single diesel engine, one that might power a typical tractor/trailer rig.
WanderingFlumph@reddit
Depends on whether you are trying to capture the emissions from the exhaust or if you are letting it mix with air first, diluting it down to 420 ppm and then trying to remove it.
Flue gas capture can be done relatively easily. It can even use the waste heat from the engine to offset the energy it uses. It would be net energy positive. You get less energy overall than comparing it to being able to freely dump the CO2 but the process still works.
But direct air capture is a lot harder. To remove 1L of CO2 with a perfectly efficient device would require you to push 2,500 L of air through. For a more realistic device that number will be more like 10,000-50,000 L. That's a lot of energy just going into running the fans and when you consider the energy cost of making the raw material that reacts with CO2 to make solid carbonates (or to use plasma to turn it into graphite/graphene) it is net energy negative, meaning your diesel engine releases more CO2 than it can power the removal of.
Possible-Anxiety-420@reddit
As an aside...
As I gather, combusting 1 gallon of diesel in a typical truck engine produces around 100 pounds of total exhaust... it's mostly air taken in by the engine.
Of that, approximately 22 pounds is CO2.
A column of air, with a cross section of 1 square inch, extending from sea level into outer space...
... weighs 14.7 lbs.
Burning the gallon of diesel released enough CO2 to completely displace 1.5 such columns of air.
Those truck get like 4 miles to the gallon.
That's just from one single lousy truck, over the course of about 4 minutes.
WanderingFlumph@reddit
My rule of thumb is that 1 pound of gasoline becomes 3 pounds of CO2. Not sure how well that translates to gallons of diesel though.
Possible-Anxiety-420@reddit
Prolly not that much difference; Diesel's more 'energy dense' than gasoline, but burning a gallon of it produces not too much less CO2... 2 or 3 fewer pounds.
A typical car engine will take longer for burn a gallon of gasoline, but for ever truck, how many cars are there?... and planes, and trains, and ships, and power plants, etc, etc, etc... all incessantly releasing carbon into the air, 24/7/365.
Based on volume alone, scrubbing' it away seems an insurmountable goal, and, as you stated... it'd be a net negative in terms of removal/release.
PilotBurner44@reddit
I saw a Top Gear Episode about that once.....
Colonol-Panic@reddit
Doesn’t the charge for solar just happen in California?
Illeazar@reddit
Yeah, this seems weird to me. Like, if your solar system was generating more than you were using or could store in a battery, and you were being penalized for sending power back onto the grid, could it just... disconnect the panels with a switch? Disconnected solar panels sitting in the sun do not get damaged by sitting there, nor are they a hazard, as far as I'm aware.
bebop_cola_good@reddit
Yeah it's the first I'm hearing of it as well. In Michigan you actually get a credit if you pump extra juice back into the system
Colonol-Panic@reddit
Yeah in CA they just have so much solar it exceeds power demand during the daytime so they literally cannot accept more grid power at certain times of day
Zenith-Astralis@reddit
Yeah there was a big battery installation that was mis managed and caught fire so I imagine that's hurting the CA grid's ability to store power at peak solar right now.
No-Sail-6510@reddit
Why not make cars have this instead?
bebop_cola_good@reddit
Because it's a crazy idea!
No-Sail-6510@reddit
OP had a bad idea. Putting them on cars might be drastic (crazy) but there’s logic.
TheDirtyPilgrim@reddit
No
nostrademons@reddit
Why not just have them come with a battery? When it generates too much power, battery stores it. When it generates too little, battery makes up the difference. And now the interface to your system is just electricity.
StrikingDeparture432@reddit
Trees are efficient carbon scrubbers.
Lars0@reddit
This is basically the business model for Terrapower. They are betting that the cost of solar panels keeps falling and they use the excess energy to make synthetic natural gas.
Francesco_dAssisi@reddit
Force solar panel supporters to carry the burden of reducing atmospheric CO2?
Sounds like a law Mobil could get behind!
PurpleToad1976@reddit
It is a much better use of the extra power to store it in batteries. Having a few days worth of electricity keeps grid demand down thus requiring fewer power plants operating. It also protects a small area from grid outages. Depending upon the situation, this could be life saving.
SentenceAwkward5302@reddit
I didn't continue reading after chapter 1 because over here excess energie gets sold not charged. Also, many people just store that energy for a cloudy day. Many people here have a zero sum energy bill or make money (small scale) to boot..
sonicjesus@reddit
They don't charge for the "right" to feed the grid, they charge the cost of doing so, which is in the billions, which is why it will never be feasible. You can't just plug a solar panel into the grid, it doesn't work that way.
Own_Pop_9711@reddit
You can literally plug a solar panel into the grid
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/12/nx-s1-5737287/solar-panels-utilities-energy-saving
Ninja_Wrangler@reddit
Plant a tree
iamabigtree@reddit
Most solar installs household or otherwise export power to the grid. There are days, such as tomorrow in the UK in fact when customers on some tariffs are paid to use electricity. Instead of doing this in a distributed way which is inefficient. You literally have a business set up to use these periods of excess energy to get paid to use it to extract CO2.
liftedlimo@reddit
Yay my $150 panels now cost $1500 and since we don't have this "extra" solar power you speak of I have to just not build a solar array.
gc3@reddit
There's a machine that uses electricity (tons) and air and water to make very expensive gasoline.
If you don't burn it again you could decarbonize this way