Ethanol is not a good solution. It's extremely inefficient to take solar radiation and turn it into corn, turn the corn into ethanol and then burn the ethanol for mechanical power.
Just turn the solar radiation into electricity and turn that into power. Solar and EVs are here now.
> Ethanol is not a good solution. It's extremely inefficient to take solar radiation and turn it into corn, turn the corn into ethanol and then burn the ethanol for mechanical power.
Brazil uses sugar cane, which has better energy yield than corn for ethanol, due to it's higher caloric content. But yes, it is less efficient than direct solar to batteries.
> Just turn the solar radiation into electricity and turn that into power. Solar and EVs are here now.
Yes, but large battery vehicles are still to expensive in developing and middle income countries - they are just now getting affordable to the masses in developed countries.
A smaller battery could easily offset 50-80% of ethanol fueled miles because most daily drives are short, so a smaller affordable PHEV with a 20kWh battery could offset a lot of liquid fuel usage.
Brazillian Ethanol is made with Sugar Cane, not corn. And it is reasonably efficient, much better than corn ethanol that is just stupid.
To make corn ethanol you get an energy loss actually, the energy usage to grow and process the corn, for example to power the tractors and so on, is bigger than the energy you can get burning it.
US government solution for this is spetacularly boneheaded too.
So USA has so much corn because it has corn subsidies. This is the reason for USA using the terrible for health corn syrup too instead of sugar from cane.
Then USA government decided to give ethanol subsidies to incentive green fuels.
Result is people make corn ethanol, get 2 subsidies, pollute a bit and cause a net energy loss.
So USA government decided solution was give a even bigger subsidy to sugar cane ethanol.
Result is Brazillians make sugar cane ethanol, sell to US companies, those companies collect the subsidy from it, buy corn ethanol that has 2 subsidies on that thus is extra cheap, sell back to Brazillians.
So now you have USA government giving 3 subsidies that result in people making a ton of corn ethanol, causing energy loss, and shipping it to Brazil, while Brazillians ship cane ethanol back, the shipping in question being done with Diesel ships.
Sometimes I wonder what the fuck is wrong with USA government to think that such decisions are good idea, wasting a ton of taxpayer money on energy losing production process and encouraging Diesel-based ocean shipping all in the name of "green".
It is not MY tax money though (I am Brazillian) so it is not like I can do anything about it.
Sugar cane ethanol still has incredible energy losses. Processing it into ethanol is an energy loss. Transporting it is a huge energy loss. And burning it is the worst. ICE engines are at best 28% efficient. That's a 70% loss.
You're too focused on 'efficiency' here. The two processes are so wildly different that a 70% loss at certain stages isn't a big deal.
A solar panel loses more than 70% of the power that hits it. But that doesn't disqualify it at all.
And plants lose a ridiculous percent of energy right at the photosynthesis stage, but they'd still beat solar panels if solar panel prices went back a few decades.
> Photosynthesis is way, way less efficient than solar panels, even oned a few decades back.
It is. But solar panels used to be so expensive that photosynthesis was much cheaper, despite the differences.
> I'm focused on efficiency because that's one very important metric when we are talking about how to power the world.
But a factor of 3 is not very much when you look at the entire process. The costs can very so wildly, and the existing steps lose so much energy, that the particular number you're pointing to isn't a big deal.
> Ethanol is a scam.
Depends on how you make it, where you intend to use it, and how much you're willing to tax carbon emissions. If fossil fuels are $2 a liter, my best estimate is that cars will switch to batteries but airplanes will buy biofuel.
Corn vs sugar doesn't matter. It's all the other steps that make ethanol not worth it. I should have said sugar in my comment to be accurate to the article, but by far most ethanol is made from corn due to US corn subsidies which is why I mentioend corn.
It really does. Corn ethanol takes a unit of fossil fuel to produce 1.3 units of ethanol, while sugar cane produces 9 units of ethanol for the same single unit of fossil fuel. I'm not sure what happened to switchgrass, but it's reportedly twice as efficient at producing ethanol as sugar cane, 20:1.
Ethanol isn't a terrible idea, depending on its source (corn is bad, while sugar cane, sugar beets and switchgrass are good). The infrastructure is already in place, takes little cost or effort to convert a petrol vehicle to ethanol, and ethanol provides better performance in ICE vehicles than petroleum, though at the cost of slightly less milage. I think losing a little milage is a small price to pay for better performance, clean air, and no contribution to Climate Change.
Electricity is much easier to transport than extremely heavy liquid fuel. Electricity is also easy to store despite what fossil fuel industry propaganda would have you believe.
> Electricity is also easy to store despite what fossil fuel industry propaganda would have you believe.
no need to assume I believe something because someone fooled me.
Electricity is not easy to transport at all.
It needs infrastructure that might not exist yet in some areas or would require massive investments.
If electricity was so easy to transport we would not buy gas from Russia, we would buy the electricity directly from them.
Simply put: transporting the fuel is easier and cheaper.
Storing it for time of need is also a no brainer.
Not because fossil fuel industry told me, but because it is what it is.
Brasil loses 16% of their power production during distribution.
Don't get me wrong, I love solar energy, I installed solar panels at my house and thanks to State incentives I paid zero of the 35k euros it would have costed, but unfortunately we are not there yet.
Completely false, if this were the case we wouldn't be in such trouble. Long duration electricity storage at a large scale and affordable price point is an unsolved problem, it's the holy grail of the renewable energy puzzle.
Transportation of electricity over thousands of kilometers and through oceans is very hard as well. Routine with natural gas.
Maybe best if you get the basics straight before jumping into the discussion.
Importantly ethanol can be transported over vast distances and stored for long periods of time, both incredible and persistent challenges for electricity.
Electricity is roughly half the price of petrol or diesel, and about the same price as propane.
I spend about as much on fuel for my elderly 20,000-mile-per-year Range Rover as half a monthly payment for a new EV, and because it's dual-fuel it's actually cleaner than an electric vehicle.
Average new car in the US costs more than 40k so it’s not a 3x price premium.
They aren’t cheap but that’s about what car companies are selling not the technology. People view 350 mile ranges as a luxury feature but they don’t require that much extra battery over a 250 mile range.
Average new car in brazil is 12~15k and that includes a ton of taxes, EVs are often 6~10x price premium as they're also heavily taxed. They're also used 30+ years which would mean like 6 battery replacements, the batteries alone would likely cost more than a whole car plus it's lifetime fuel in Brazil unless it's a heavily used vehicle like a shift-rented uber.
I suspect the battery manufacturing would also be far worse than the lifetime of alcohol for the environment, but that depends a lot on how each is made.
Batteries are lasting much longer as the pack sizes increase and chemistry improves. Unless you’re planning on driving 1 million miles you shouldn’t need to replace the battery on a long range EV.
Meanwhile paying for 30 years of gas adds up, especially when fuel economy decreases with age.
The energy used to recharge batteries right now is being mostly produced using traditional means of power production, mostly fossil.
So in the end we are only shifting costs, not really saving.
Another important point not being discussed is that used vehicles are dirty cheap (easily under 1k) and can still run with very little engine maintenance with the only cost being fuel.
With the energy crisis we are living, I'm not sure EV are going to cost so much less than ICE to operate.
If you need to change tires or get into an accident and the car needs repairs, it doesn't matter if it's an EV or an ICE,
You still have to pay for it and probably the EV cannot be repaired by a gas station mechanic.
The same gas station worker might lose business due to EVs becoming more popular and that's not gonna be cheap economically and socially.
Before it's gonna be cheaper, we need to completely overhaul the way transport economics works.
I don't have the slightest idea of how long it is gonna take, but it's not gonna be tomorrow.
Environmentally a great deal of CO2 comes from to extracting crude oil, transport, refine, and distribute gasoline. Roughly 1kg of CO2 per gallon of gas is released just in the refining process while 8.9kg comes from actually burning the fuel.
Next out of global electricity production 16% is hydro, 10.3% nuclear, 5.3% is wind, and solar is 2.5%. And wind and solar numbers are rapidly trending upwards. The 23% from Natural gas is also vastly cleaner both from extremely efficient turbines and because of inherent advantages to the fuel.
It’s only the 36.7% that from coal where the numbers come close while still slightly favoring EV’s per mile.
Completely agree on all the points, we burn oil in ICE engines simply because it's ready for direct use, but what if we switched to natural gas fueled cars?
ICE engines can easily be adapted to use it, the infrastructure for gas pumps is already in place, I do not own a car but when I need one I use my mother's car that runs on methane gas.
Of course EV fueled by 100% green energy is the future we all hope for, but I wouldn't discard the economic advantage, especially in less developed countries, of cheap cars that run on greener fuel.
There are also many countries like China or Germany that are heavily reliant on coal for energy production right now, because it makes it easier to adapt the output to the demand, maybe a more mixed approach instead of "EV or die" could lead to a faster transition curve toward less CO2 intensive vehicles and one that is economically more feasible on a global scale.
I also doubt Brazil will be full of Tesla anytime soon.
>It’s only the 36.7% that from coal where the numbers come close
The problem is, when you add that demand to your power grid, is that increasing the supply of hydro, nuclear, wind, or solar? In practice, the extra demand from EVs only increases the correlated amount of coal used as that is where the excess of potential electricity generation is, for now.
I don’t know about other countries but for US and China coal is significantly underrepresented in new power plant construction relative to it’s share of total production.
Cheaper upfront, the problem is how much ethanol and gasoline costs. It’s the same reason people put solar on their roof, sure it costs more on day 1 but for most people lowering the electric bill more than compensates.
TCO is not so relevant if you don't have the upfront money.
Reason why not many people buy new houses with lower TCO, they prefer to spend a bit more every month to heat/cool them, because they can squeeze the money out of their monthly budget, than spend 3x upfront.
Solar panels are also heavily subsidized almost everywhere.
Unless you’re paying cash for a house or car it’s the monthly payment that’s important more than the upfront cost.
I don’t know what the Brazil mortgage market is like, but having a mortgage that’s larger and a keeping your other bills much smaller should be a net win without spending more out of pocket.
Speaking of my country, if you ask for a mortgage you usually have to put at least 20% of the total upfront and the bank can deny it for lack of guarantees or it's too large for your pockets.
So on average people prefer to spend less than spend more and amortizing the difference in the future.
For that reason there's been a quite successful program of State incentives in .y country to install solar panels or increase energy efficiency of buildings so that it would cost people zero or close to zero to upgrade .
Otherwise people would have wait for the prices to drop a lot more than they are right now.
Just turn the solar radiation into electricity and turn that into power. Solar and EVs are here now.