> to grab a million tons of carbon, a direct air capture plant could devour on the order of 300 to 500 megawatts of energy per year—enough to power some 30,000 American homes.
Great insight as to why we shouldn’t stop ramping renewables deployments. You need not only cover current electrical demand, but demand growth over time, transportation, HVAC, and all of the energy needed to sequester excess atmospheric CO2 emitted during human industrialization (>1000 gigatonnes based on 280ppm atmospheric CO2 pre industrialization and 420ppm current state).
Maybe it's a better idea to release massive amounts of N2 and O2 rather than chasing a 100ppm of CO2 here and there.
In, like, setting up petawatts of nuclear electrolysing plants that will split seawater into H2 and O2, where the gases will dilute the atmosphere enough that CO2 levels drop.
This harebrained idea is on par with those CCS projects, but has the nice side effect that the nukes can sometime later be repurposed to more useful things.
No, a Megawatt-year (MWyr) is a measure of energy. A Megawatt per year (MW/yr) is not. It's the difference between multiplication and division.
From Wikipedia:
"Misuse of watts per hour
Many compound units for various kinds of rates explicitly mention units of time to indicate a change over time. For example: miles per hour, kilometres per hour, dollars per hour. Power units, such as kW, already measure the rate of energy per unit time (kW=kJ/s). Kilowatt-hours are a product of power and time, not a rate of change of power with time.
Watts per hour (W/h) is a unit of a change of power per hour, i.e. an acceleration in the delivery of energy. It is used to measure the daily variation of demand (e.g. the slope of the duck curve), or ramp-up behavior of power plants. For example, a power plant that reaches a power output of 1 MW from 0 MW in 15 minutes has a ramp-up rate of 4 MW/h.
Other uses of terms such as watts per hour are likely to be errors."
