Have fun trying to convert your car to M-TDI with nukes going off overhead. Why bother investing in a solar array, when you could build a Faraday cage garage instead. Prepper priorities.
Actually I'm over a hundred miles away from any likely targets, you think I should put a steel door on my concrete garage to complete the cage?
Why not stick with that? Why do y'all feel the need to peddle so much disinformation?
If you're the only guy in town with a running car, it's going to get stolen. You can keep a food stash secret, but the first time you use your car, everyone knows.
Soybeans and Oilseed? Is there a glut of soybeans and oilseed? Do you want another spike in food prices? The dumbest thing we can do is to use farmland to make fuel.
It says in the letter:
.... yeah.... they're exceeding the EPA quota and asking for more subsidies to convert more food into fuel. It's not like the food is going to waste... it's being used as food. Hence my point that 'all the feed stock is being used'. Food should be used as food not fuel.
I agree, but there's a LOT of waste material that COULD be used for BBD feedstock.
What waste? Where? The letter isn't asking for waste to be converted. They're asking to get paid to turn more soybeans and Oilseed into fuel instead of selling it as food. 41 lbs of soybeans is better as 41 lbs of soybeans not 1 gallon of diesel.
www.redrockbio.com
There are all kinds of applications out here in rural America that EVs won't be able to do for decades, but biofuels are ready to go to work reducing GHGs now. Sorry, the planet is on fire, and we can't wait for your EV cultist's EV tractor fantasies!
So you want us to let almost half our fields go fallow and drive the farmers bankrupt and produce even more GHGs running our vehicles and tractors on oil instead of biofuels... And you call yourself an environmentalist?
How precisely would wind, solar and storage be unable to 'do the whole job'?
Farming more sustainably using cover crops for a fews seasons would REDUCE GHGs since it would require less fertilizer. And there's something to be said for 're-wilding' some areas. People complain about solar farms taking farmland but 1 acre of solar is ~40x more productive than an acre of corn if it's just being used for fuel.
Or Saint Paul district energy, which has been powering, heating, and cooling downtown Saint Paul with scrap wood for over four decades! https://www.districtenergy.com/about/history/There's a HUGE supply of waste forest material that's not only potentially available, there's a desperate need for a market for it.
The main issue with massive wildfires is the massive fuel loadings in many forest lands in the U.S. If these lands were better managed and excess vegetation used for feedstock for BBD, we could solve two issues with one solution - reduce massive wildfires and provide a feedstock for renewable diesel.
Red Rock Biofuels
Sure. Cheap and easy to burn wood to boil water. Converting it into diesel is another matter entirely. And that's another competitor for feedstock. Old coal plants are buying up every lb of biomass they can get their hands on to burn.
Then why is <1% of electricity generated in the U.S. from biomass (0.3% according to GREET model)?
velocys.com
Um... probably a lack of feedstock. Just because there are piles of debris available in the forests doesn't mean it's logistically or economically feasible to go retrieve it.
Cost and feedstock. It's pretty easy to achieve < $0.01/mile with an EV powered from solar or wind. Just the cost of converting any feedstock even if that feed stock is free is going to be >2x that. Solar and Wind are an effectively infinite 'feedstock'. We'll run out of ways to use them before we run out of solar or wind.
So we're just going to proceed as usual and let those wildfires burn uncontrolled releasing not only massive amount of GHGs but criteria pollutants like PM2.5, which is being felt in much of the Eastern U.S. now?
If you knew what you were talking about you'd be promoting wind instead of solar which only survives in the market as a visual virtue signal and because of mandates and heavy subsidies. Solar has a miserable 20% availability and after you add battery storage to a try to fix that problem the costs go through the roof because the whole bad investment has a life of only 10-20 years and the costs make diesel generators look tempting. Car batteries as storage? No way is the utility going to drain my batteries overnight so I can't make a medical appointment! As for that acre of solar being more productive than corn, that only happens if the solar comes with huge subsidies.
You want wood biomass, come and get it!
Are there ANY pathways in which BEVs can even be carbon neutral over its entire lifecycle, much less carbon negative? There aren't in GREET, even with 100% renewable electricity.
Forests burn. It's part of being a forest. The solution is more controlled burns. Whether they burn or rot the GHGs get returned to the atmosphere. Unlike oil they're part of the carbon cycle.
I promote both. Wind and Solar are great partners. Wind and solar peak at opposite times of day/year. Not sure how you got so corrupted with so much misinformation about solar. The warranty is 25 years. There are panels from 1980 that still work fine. Not much to go wrong. 40 years of life should be easy. You're paying ~$20k for >$80k worth of electricity over 40 years. No need for batteries anytime soon.
Isn't it all just a question of economics? The 'carbon negative' fuel is negative because it's sequestering carbon? How much is it per gallon?
Wind doesn't scale down like solar does. Anything < 100kW isn't worth it. Only commercial scale wind is economically viable.
Thanks for agreeing with my decision not to "invest" in solar- Nearby wind farm has contracted long term to produce at less than a penny per KW/hour, no way I can compete with that!
