What is your measure of efficiency? I ask because the cost of sunlight is nominally zero so 10kWh/$0 is a really big number :-).
Note that the article said that as a thermal plant it operates 24/7 by storing heat in a high thermal mass fluid. Another shot at this is
Terraform Industries (https://terraformindustries.com/) which is doing something similar with direct PV -> Fuel (rather than using CSP)
The "magic bean", the "trick", the "secret sauce" here is that there are huge swathes of land that are currently both high sunlight receivers and not used (can't farm them, no one wants to live there, think deserts) That could be used to crank out liquid fuel that has no issue being losslessly transported over long distances and for applications that are unlikely to run on batteries any time soon. Making fuel for those by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is a double win.
> Making fuel for those by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is a double win.
It's just a single win because the CO2 is going right back into the atmosphere as the fuel is used (carbon neutral, not carbon negative). Still, a win is better than the loss that extracted fuels amount to.
I agree but you could still argue that any economic incentive to develop better carbon capture is another win. If captured fuel gets lots of use, maybe it will become cheap enough to manufacture that we will do so purely for environmental reasons.
the investment into the panels is not free though. But i do agree - converting electricity into fuels is great, but only if said electricity does not have another use and would've been wasted otherwise.
The capex in something, the opex is neglible, but the opportunity cost doesn't make sense until energy prices go very low or negative is some permanent fashion, or both fuel costs are very high and the switching to alternatives costs too much, or is even infeasible (e.g., air and space transport, shipping, steel production). A premium might make sense for specialist operators who want 'carbon neutral fuel', and have customers willing to pay for it.
It's not entirely clear, that we can use e.g. deserts "for free". Changing the albedo of significant amounts of surface can have far reaching consequences. And unlike already populated areas (were this already happened), we don't really know what will happen there (probably until we try)
"In part" means 0.00107°C over the next century. That's less than a thousandth of the overall rise. So it's really not the top priority. Even assuming this technology increases it by a factor of 10 it's a massive net gain to displace fossil fuels.
This is a cool project, but it's fair to say that 10 litres of petrol a day isn't sufficient scale to be described as "THE WORLD’S first industrial plant using solar heat to make fuels". It's a research prototype.
Sure, if you're doing a TCO analysis you figure out a deprecation schedule for your physical plant and your OpEx for the day to day operations. Of course the CapEx for "one" versus the CapEx per instance for "one thousand" will be quite different. Also how much site prep is needed, how much can be built offsite in a factory setting Etc. So a full economic analysis would incorporate all of that. Then price that against the price of fuel with the carbon and environmental externalities priced in, sure. That would give you a solid set of reasoning to say whether these systems are worse, similar to, or better than existing systems.
If you wait for all of that to be in place (versus risking capital today that might have been used for other things) then you risk dying from those aforementioned externalities of 'business as usual' (aka the do nothing hypothesis).
John was, in my reading, defining "efficiency" to be turning the solar power available as electricity in the surface area of the plant into liquid fuel. And my response to that is always that the solar energy was going to hit that patch of ground anyway, and if you don't have the infrastructure to move it to where it is needed "right now" or store it, then its wasted. California is, today, having days where Solar and/or Wind generation is discarded because there are no customers demanding it. At some point (hopefully soon) we'll get better at dealing with this situation, and converting that "extra" power into syngas is a good use for it.
Note that the article said that as a thermal plant it operates 24/7 by storing heat in a high thermal mass fluid. Another shot at this is Terraform Industries (https://terraformindustries.com/) which is doing something similar with direct PV -> Fuel (rather than using CSP)
The "magic bean", the "trick", the "secret sauce" here is that there are huge swathes of land that are currently both high sunlight receivers and not used (can't farm them, no one wants to live there, think deserts) That could be used to crank out liquid fuel that has no issue being losslessly transported over long distances and for applications that are unlikely to run on batteries any time soon. Making fuel for those by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is a double win.