10 thoughts on “The Democrats’ Green-Energy Dream”

  1. With oil at over $100 USD a barrel back then these projects made a lot of sense. Of course some of them were bound to fail. The whole point of government funding of this kind of R&D and leading edge tech is precisely because the risk is too high for private capital to fund it, but the possible payoff is quite large.

    Algae biofuel, which is talked in the article, is one good example. If it was made cheap enough it could actually replace petroleum. Biofuels based on crops are simply a bad idea because of the water and farming land area requirements. Algae could totally change the concept since you could use salt water and desert which is useless for farming. Also algae have the potential to grow more oil per area than crop based biofuels. Algae can also be used in the food and pharmaceutical industry by reducing the cost and farm area required to produce edible oils. Algae oil could easily displace palm oil in a lot of applications. In fact it already has been doing that in a limited degree.

    Now that petroleum prices have come down again and the US shale oil reserves are quantified and substantial I expect most of the funding on these projects will wind down.

    1. With oil at over $100 USD a barrel back then these projects made a lot of sense.

      If that were true, they wouldn’t have needed the subsidies.

      The whole point of government funding of this kind of R&D and leading edge tech

      That’s not the issue. The issue is subsidizing operational companies, like Solyndra, with hand outs and tax breaks, and all the opportunities for corruption (which turned out, as usual, to be fully taken).

    2. At the root, algae derived oil is just solar power conversion. As such, it requires too much land, material, and maintenance to realistically satisfy more than a fraction of our energy appetite.

      1. You underestimate solar power density. If you actually do the math you would see that you can actually use solar to generate all global energy requirements with a relatively small amount of land area even at a conversion efficiency of 18-20%. Plus the areas with the highest solar insolation are deserts. The problems are $/Whr, transmission, storage, etc. But that’s for solar PV or solar thermal. Biological systems are a lot less efficient. The main promise of the biological systems is lower costs since they are by their nature self-healing and self-reproducible. Plus oil is a lot easier to store than electricity.

        Algae are a lot more efficient at producing oil than any other plant. They are more efficient in producing oil/area than palm trees. Some people think that it is not possible to have really cheap algae oil, competitive with petroleum, without doing genetic engineering on algae. IIRC UCB has done some positive work on that but it is not something that is going to hit the market any time soon.

        Most current algae oil companies use non-GM algae in monitored, expensive, high-density growth vats rather than open ponds. Systems like that are not cost effective against petroleum, especially not at current prices, but they can still compete with crops in certain niche applications in the food and pharmaceutical industries and that’s where most of these companies operate right now. These kinds of systems are not economically viable as a petroleum replacement.

        1. “If you actually do the math you would see that you can actually use solar to generate all global energy requirements with a relatively small amount of land area even at a conversion efficiency of 18-20%.”

          If you actually, actually do the math, you would see that “relatively small” relative to the entire surface of the Earth is still really, really big. The infrastructure alone required is not only mind-boggling at current production rates of key raw materials, but covering that large of an area with pond scum grown so as to soak up as much sunlight as possible would have dramatic environmental effects, ranging from crippling loss of habitat for thousands of species to an urban heat island effect on steroids.

          As for conversion efficiency of 18-20%, I think that is very optimistic.

    1. FTA: “Now imagine if they could use that juice to eliminate their home electric bill.”

      Does this mean they’ve perfected John Galt’s dynamo for drawing electricity out of the air to charge the batteries?

      1. Hence Glenn’s comment on graft. Musk takes money from subsidies and then donates to Obama. The rich get richer and the middle class is screwed with higher taxes and no subsidies. Even with subsidies, a baseline Tesla S costs over $60,000 with incentives ($7500 federal tax credit) applied. Compare Prius plug-in baseline is $30,000 and a fossil fuel burning Yaris is only $15,000.

Comments are closed.