Airline Flies a 747 on Fuel From a Plant

[Black Landlord]

mattkime wrote:
[quote=Dakota]Every alternative fuel takes something else away and that something is itself finite.

like sunlight?
I basically agree with Dakota (and davester) on this point.
Don't discount the resources needed to grow, harvest, refine, and transport this stuff.
We're a good 50 years from any such thing as a "sustainable" biofuel.

[macphanatic]

Some of the grasses and other vegetation that are being tried as sources for fuel will grow in swamps and other areas that traditional vegetation can't grow. I read that the benefit of these plants is that they might actually help stabilize these areas from an environmental standpoint as they are cut and not harvested. This leaves the plant and root structure in place.

[Mac1337]

mattkime wrote:
[quote=Dakota]Every alternative fuel takes something else away and that something is itself finite.

like sunlight?
No, real estate. Where are you gonna put all those solar panels? How many hundreds of thousands of square miles do you have render unusable for anything else? Cleaning? Well, you need an army to squeegee them. Same goes for windmills. A planned 2000 MW windfarm in the Dakotas requires upwards of 1000 square miles of land housing 1200 turbines crisscrossed with transmission lines. It is a nightmare.

[Speedy]

The wind farms take up very little arable land, especially so in the western Dakotas. No crisscrossing of power lines because it is all underground except for the main transmission line running away from the farm which is what you would have with any type of generator. They frequently have roads between the towers but these aren't essential, just convenient. Beats any other manufactured renewable.