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Renegade 13 said:
Inaccurate. There is no net release of carbon.
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Where the heck are you going to get the energy to till, plant, harvest, ferment, and refine the alky? Do you have any idea how much carbon is vented by an acre of tilled land? Do you have any idea how many regulated chemicals are needed to grow a crop like hybrid corn? 0 waste carbon is an invention from some slick publicity agency. It only has value when only the actual carbon in the fuel in measured. When the Brazilians’ were doing it they were using some purpose grown crops and a lot of waste biomaterial from the sugar industry. They still had almost a man hour per gallon of fuel produced. It was never profitable and as demand for fuel rose, they couldn’t justify the costs of expansion. Bio alky is one of the biggest fictions of the decade. It’s typical politics and almost totally promoted by the bio industry. If you were Conaggra, would you rather sell a million tons of corn as feed and get $3.40 a bushel? Or would you rather turn it into alky and realize $5.00 per bushel. Of course feed corn will rise to the same level. So beef and chicken will more or less double in price. But the big Farm corporations will plant lots of corn and make lots of money. Their lawyers will be able to handle the subsidy paper work, and their congressmen will provide tax loop holes. The little guys with a 1000 acres or so will be right where they are today. The demand for fertilizer and chemicals will cause the prices to rise, absorbing any increase in the profits that they were expecting. Oh, and lets not forget the down side of speed fermenting, many of these fermentation plants will be located right in those nice quiet little country towns.
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As you mentioned, in Northern areas this would not work. Winter isn't a great time of year for sunlight.  I think wind turbines would be a lot more expensive than solar, and for that matter where would the average city-dwelling person put a wind turbine? You'd need a lot of them and a good, constant wind to be of any use. Wind is impractical in cities and solar is no good in Northern areas. So what do people in those positions do?
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Mass production on this scale would reduce the costs significantly. The fan head on a 12 foot generator would be about the price of a good lawn mower. In cities, the tall buildings would provide excellent sites for generation units. And remember, they don’t have to look like aircraft engines. They can have ducted parallel blades also. These could be mounted on the sides of tall buildings.
As for solar panels, the technology to spray the materials onto a backing material with an inkjet printing process is in use today. If this was scaled up in size, it could economically be used in housing.
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Again, I do not like this idea. Those of us who need trucks for the 4x4 ability, just to get around in the spring/fall when the roads turn to slippery ****e, should we take a massive hit just because of our geographical location? I don't think so.
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Save that for someone who doesn't know better. You do not need a big Cummings Turbo powered 4x4 to get around in when the weather is bad. Hey, I feel your need, but I don’t buy the reason. I’ve got my full size Chevy 4x4 sitting out back. Biggest engine I could get in a half ton at the time. Heavy duty everything. But I drive a Honda Civic Hybrid to work everyday. And I’ve got a little 44 jeep that will go through any snow and muck that the truck will, on a quarter of the gas. Those big pickups could easily be replaced with smaller more fuel efficient 4x4’s. I have yet to see a farm that didn’t have tractors, wagons, and heavy trucks, what do you really need a big pick up for. Around here every farmer has several. The tax laws encouraged them to buy them. They ride around in them with 40 or 50 pounds of junk in the back and brag about how little fuel they use.
I won’t get into the rural vs. urban thing. I type way to slow for that. I will say that most big cities have a net loss on revenues. As do the rural areas. The revenue hogs are the outer suburbs where development has outrun infrastructure.
Oh, and while we are on the subject…….I thought that up there in the far north, people just got snowed in for the winter. That’s why all the birthdays are in the early summer
