Yeah, but nobody’s be stupid enough to put shadowing solar panels over prime farmland. You can put them over barren land. The Meinel’s (non-photocell) “Solar Farm” concept was supposed to be used in the desert.
So why not use corn-for-ethanol and solar energy? I’m not convinced that converting biomass to ethanol (or methanol) is a winning proposition. It seems too likely to be an energy sink than a source, and it costs effort and money and depletes the soil. But, to be fair, I don’t have the facts on this. I have to read the above literatutre, and other stuff. But my recollections on biomass power (from data now very old) was that it wasn’t even break-even.
Only that we can’t digest it. The stalks still include a lot of sugar (from which ethanol is derived) but it’s linked in ways that our digestive systems can’t process.
The “fiber” in foodstuffs is the parts we can swallow but not digest; most of it is cellullose (which is 100% sugar same as the “carbs” we can digest, but with bonds for which we don’t have a “knife” enzyme). In the case of hard plants (trees) you also get the lignine family of compounds, which includes some sugar but also other stuff and which is indigestible to herbivores.
The “unbreakable bond” in cellulose can be broken by highly acidic environments; some of it gets broken down in our stomachs but not enough to really make an impact. Herbivores like cows and goats get both an enzime that can break it (and we lack) and extra-long digestions, with the cellulose spending extra-long time under those acidic conditions.
But you need to spend energy synthesizing it. So it’s a black hole, that energy has to come from somewhere; also, if you’re using those sources to make MeOH you’re not freeing them for usages with higher added value (like synthesizing medicines). The point with plant-originated ethanol is that it both uses the sun as an energy source and frees up the gas and oil for higher value usages.
It depends where your energy is coming from. But, if it takes a gallon of fuel to drive the tractors, transport the sugar, heat the frementation tanks etc to produce a gallon equivalent of ethanol, then the carbon balance is the same.
You could argue that that you could have used hydroelectricity etc to generate the power in which case you are in the black. However, the electricity you used meant someone else could not use it, and so might have had to use a nonrenewable source, generating the carbon instead of you.
Capacitors are great for rapid release of energy, but the quantity of energy they can hold is relatively low. New technologies like nanotube capacitors may increase that dramatically, however. Still not enough to replace batteries, but enough that you could use a capacitor in your car to provide peak power for better acceleration.
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Not capacitors, capacitor batteries. I’ve seen them work. They don’t store as much electricity compared to a battery of similar size but they may very well outperform batteries by weight. I’ve seen them demonstrated in power tools and although they don’t hold a charge as long as a conventional battery they can be recharged in minutes so the downtime is much better. If you take something like a car hood and put solar cells on one side and capacitor batteries on the other side then you are combining 2 technologies into a structure that serves no purpose other than appearance.
how about instead of building expensive specialized fuel factory, that isnt even feasible or sensible but apparently profitable. how about nuclear power and electric cars. with gas pumps replaced by charging stations. home run for us, its a no brainer etc.
thats the future.
i think hippies created environmental oriented organizations during the 70’s and then over the years theyve turned into monsters trying to make a buck. its pretty disgusting.
and besides think about how many innocent people would be arrested for dwi, think about the people hippies