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Plan to sell 50m meals made from electricity, water and air

14 points| aleksei | 6 years ago |theguardian.com

7 comments

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londons_explore|6 years ago

How many joules of energy are needed per gram of protein...?

That's the key number this article should have found out and quoted. They should have compared it to grow-lamps and other closed-environment food production methods. If the numbers didn't look good, they should have also quoted an engineer saying "this is what we can do now, but we hope to get it down to X, and it theoretically can go as low as Y".

Those numbers could have been brought into context by saying "with current solar technology, that means the whole world population could be fed with solar panels the size of Ethiopia".

herogreen|6 years ago

and carbon.

incompatible|6 years ago

Proteins, made from carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, all found in air + water. Some proteins also need sulfur. This is from a cursory glance at Wikipedia.

vbuwivbiu|6 years ago

yeast

schiffern|6 years ago

...are still powered by photosynthesis, because they eat plant-derived material (sugars, etc). This is powered by abiotic hydrogen from electrolysis.