In fact, it’s probably better to admit that there is no one perfect solution and to go ahead and experiment, improve effieciency on what is available and pursue many different alternative sources.

Waiting for perfection keeps us in a rut, while remaining dependent on foreign oil keeps us at risk.

The biggest hurdle the cellulosic ethanol producers face at the moment is the cost of the enzyme needed to breakdown the cellulose into a sugar. While everyone from private industry to the US govt is throwing money at these research projects, we have yet to hear how they are going. I posted last week on this topic specifically in the article, Cellulosic Enzyme Cost Reduction is still a WIP”.

Taking away our dependence from corn requires a different ethanol strategy. One way to go about this is to empower local communities to produce ethanol from the best available feedstock. I wrote a long article yesterday on the benefits of decentralizing, or “regionalizing” alternative energy as it relates to ethanol production.

Not only does this support the local economy, but it reduces the strain on major ethanol crops like corn.

I frequently write about the business side of alternative energy on: Energy Spin: Alternative Energy Blog for Investors-Served Daily

Cheers,
Francesco DeParis

For example, while geothermic technology won’t ever produce a whole lot of electricity, it can be used to drastically reduce heating and cooling energy use. The industry website says: “According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, geoexchange systems save homeowners 30-70 percent in heating costs, and 20-50 percent in cooling costs, compared to conventional systems.” The Dept of Energy website says that the cost of installing a pump is recovered in 5-10 years and will last “50+ years.”

Also green (but stylish) architecture has really advanced in the last couple decades. Making buildings more energy efficient is (theoretically) getting to be a lot cheaper and I’m aghast that it’s still considered a niche industry. I never thought I’d say this, but Walmart is actually making a big push to make its stores much more energy efficient and I hope other major companies follow.

The problem is that the two politically chosen things are very expensive and not that effective from a scientific standpoint. A few years ago some economists looked at fuel cells and said it’d be cheaper and better for the environment to have drastic increase in fuel efficiencies now, forget about fuel cells and wait until something else comes along.

Also genetic engineering will really help out a lot in raising crop yields and hopefully making cellulose ethanol viable.

Every acre dedicated to subsidized ethanol is also taken out of production for food crops.

While the only viable source of ethanol is corn this partially true. The reason it is only partially true is that if production of corn meant only for ethanol (It doesn’t have to have the appearance or tastiness of corn grown for food.) is undertaken there are millions of acres in the U.S. that have gone out of production in the last few decades because farming wasn’t profitable any longer that could come back into production. In addition if cellulose based ethanol is improved enough to become viable it will be able to grow on land that is unsuitable for food crops.

Dairy farmers are already feeling the effects, the price of feed corn is going up rapidly and is harder to get.