Corn ethanol, a bad idea whose time has gone. Buh-bye , unless they try to sneak it through again. But there is major Congressional opposition to this wasteful practice that doesn’t work well, drives up food prices, and exists primarily to give patronage to Big Ag. Biofuel from crop leftovers, wood waste, and algae is the future.
I think it’s about time that all consumer energy subsidies are removed and a more level playing field is created when it comes to energy production. If oil subsidies were removed then renewable energy would be cheap in comparison and more companies would find ways to recover energy waste and make engines more efficient to run. I’m shocked that vehicles don’t already take the heat the engines generate to create additional power that could be used or stored.
Yet most grid scale renewable energy projects wouldn’t happen without government R&D and loan guarantees.
Who is going to care about grid energy when every consumer can be a producer of renewable energy? I think the only way we’re going to be paying for electricity in the future to some energy company is if everybody is given solar panels for free including install and they’re charged for the energy they use at a dirt cheap rate. That way we won’t buy our own solar panels and tell the energy companies to go F[ ]k themselves.
Big industry and businesses can’t generate all their own power. We will always need grid-scale power plants.And what happens if LA is overcast for a week?
God forbid we should look at trying to conserve the 75% of energy that gets wasted in this country. We’re still focused on increasing production, which is an inherently unsustainable approach regardless of the source. Imagine: if we could eliminate half the waste, we could shut down almost every coal plant in the nation without building a single new plant for solar panel! Build more solar panels, save more energy, mothball more coal plants… and then gas and oil and nuke… But there’s no jobs (or profits) in mothballing power plants so we won’t hear about that until– well, maybe never.