This is a minor innovative being overly puffed to get clicks.
The number came from “if every power plant in the world was 2% more efficient, this is how much CO2 we’d save”.
This will not be deployed globally and there’s a lot of 2%s to be found outside the condenser. Including 100% reduction by shutting down fossil fuel plants.
Don’t underestimate the 1% effects, they add up. I agree it is unlikely they will get rolled out at mass, but everything helps.
Don’t know why you were downvoted, it’s true. I don’t believe in fossil fuels being burned either, but you may as well reach the same goal by improving what otherwise isn’t realistic to entirely remove. We won’t get anywhere without compromises, and we should continue to try to invest in cleaner energy, even if that means improving the existing dirty energy.
This works for nuclear too, and possibly thermal energy plants.
If we invested in nuclear and the public were actually properly educated without all the scary media scorn on it, we would have invested without so much resistance and be in a MUCH better place by now as it would have taken coal and gas off the grid. Here in the UK we have excellent renewable opportunities for wind, but we didn’t invest enough, nor did we invest enough in our own nuclear. When the pandemic hit, and the oil gas crisis happened, we were using 50-60% of our energy from GAS. We can’t turn them off or we’ll have brownouts, so it’s an uphill battle to get rid of our dependency.
Because our government didn’t invest in nuclear or wind or solar, and they didn’t put pressure on private energy companies to use alternatives, all the country got hit with enormous gas and electric prices. We sowed our own fate by not protecting the environment and pioneering alternative energy, and now our wallets finally pay the full price.
Saying that, the oil gas companies are minted now… Maybe we should punish the energy companies for not meeting their goals or promises, and for not taking responsibility for investing. You’d think taxes, but or Tory government wouldn’t want to harm their best pals in the energy business. Screw the government for that one. My bills are killing me.
These small improvements help still.
… steam is then collected in a condenser to reclaim the water to continue the cycle.
The researchers on the new study set out to improve the efficiency of the heat transfer of the condenser pipes. They developed a coating made of fluorinated diamond-like carbon (F-DLC), a material that’s hydrophobic, or water-repelling. When the steam condenses on the coated pipes, it no longer forms a thin film but balls up into droplets much more easily. That helps it run off faster, allowing more steam to come into contact with the pipe sooner.
Interesting approach.
Depending on the cost of it something like that could potentially also be used on air-conditioner evaporators to improve efficiency
What about the trillions that are already in the atmosphere?
There is this new way for turning co2 into propane that I saw on hacker news. Maybe we can subsidize the process as a long-term energy storage solution instead of batteries? Would help with global warming and recapturing the burned propane(which turns into co2) is easy enough. Don’t know how viable it is, just a thought
Combusting fossil fuels has a peak efficiency of ~60% (around 40% for ICE).
I’ve no doubt it will likely be required for decarbonization, but I somewhat doubt it will be useful for grid electricity. It’s more likely (IMO) that the CO2->fuel route will mostly likely be used for things like airplane travel where the energy density of batteries is unlikely to get high enough to work well. (A battery plane with ~1hour flight is possible but it requires uber high density batteries). It might also be useful for generating fuel for shipping.
republicans will attempt to ban this substance on principal
The opposite, they’ll use this to act like “see, clean CO2 plants, let’s build more!”.
Why do you think so?
