37 comments on Biofuel progress, a report from Dubuque
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37 comments on Biofuel progress, a report from Dubuque
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GAIA Host Collective
You are never going to replace the sun efficiently. Electrical engineers understand this - their crowning achievement was the spread of 1% efficient light bulbs, currently being replaced by 10% efficient bulbs by the green movement. Algae do not live on CO2 - they live on sunlight, their energy source - which they store by building CO2 up into carbohydrates. They live on great scads of it, a kilowatt per square meter peak (around 200 watts average). A thin layer of slime might not use all of that sunlight - and so algae have evolved mechanisms to rise to the top when they need energy, and sink when they're full; Even if they hadn't, simple water pumps can cycle a tank very, very efficiently. Even largescale agricultural processes like cheesemaking do it on a few watts of handpower, often.
Plant biofuels exist to *HARVEST SUNLIGHT.* Sticking them underground is utterly counterproductive.
The United States has a great amount of land *aboveground* that it doesn't use - go find an alkali flat, for the love of Bob.
"LEDS at tuned frequencies" to grow biofuels should be an utter outrage for environmentalists, as long as anyone in the world is using coal for electricity generation.
The overall fuel consumption of this approach in tons of coal per mile, compared to using it to charge a battery in an EV, is literally hundreds of times higher.