Will There Be Enough Power to Remove Carbon From the Sky?
(Editors note: This is the second edition of The Climate Fix, a twice-a-month look at some of the biggest and most promising solutions to climate change. Read the last version here . Got comments? Email us at Climateforward@nytimes.com .)
Thanks in large part to booming data center construction and the surge in artificial intelligence, electricity demand in the U.S. is rising for the first time in decades.
But the timing of this rise in demand, as far as the race to fight global warming goes, is awkward.
To help fight climate change, the nascent direct air capture industry is racing to develop technology to remove carbon dioxide directly from the sky. But in some areas of the country, the DAC industry is facing a shortage of available renewable energy to run its operations, particularly wind and solar power.
As David Gelles reported last year, there's been a gold rush of investment over the last several years into companies that aim to pull carbon from the atmosphere, many of which then bury that carbon underground. One chief executive told Gelles that carbon dioxide removal was 'the single greatest opportunity I've seen in 20 years of doing venture capital.'
Still, DAC companies, which are working to prove they can scale up their technology, have been vying for limited resources in an increasingly competitive U.S. power market.
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