It solar powered and even self-replicating!
The only maintenance I've found you needed to do is clear the windows - do it at least monthly during the growing season. And also don't let it grow on to gutters.
Basically push the ivy off of the windows so it hangs down. Hanging down like that seems to send the plant a signal to stop growing in the area. (If you cut it it seems to grow even faster there.)
If the plant dies, which does happen, you need to wait a while for the glue pads to degrade before removing the old plant from the walls.
It's not really any harder than dealing with gardening in general.
Can you elaborate on how this is a better startup idea than funding projects that are fighting climate change at scale? Curious to hear your thoughts.
Rough outline from Rod Fitzsimmons:
- capture of CO2 from the atmosphere using a variety of techniques, usually adsorbtion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage). This takes quite a bit of energy.
- Conversion of the dissolved CO2 into alcohols. Reaction is 2CO2 + 9H2O + 12e- → C2H5OH + 12OH- so it's energy-uphill and needs an energy input. Maybe solar cells or a wind turbine. Requires a catalyst, often a variety of copper matrix. Catalysts are the major subject of research. To figure out whether you could do this in your garage you'd probably need to go to the literature.
- Distillation of the alcohols - usually done with heat, requires 800-900 deg C. Possible but hard and energy intensive. This is where Prometheus sits, they have a nanoscale membrane that does room-temperature separation of the alcohols using electricity input (more energy in!)
- Conversion of the alcohols into gasoline, diesel, kerosene etc. This is a pretty well-known process that uses a catalyst called ZSM-5 plus heat (mo' mo' energy!). I haven't looked into the chemistry or the availability of the catalyst.
This seems like a better startup idea than a project funding aggregator.