Hacker News Reader

Comment by postepowanieadm | Hacker News Reader

There's a simpler way: you may burn oats and generate heat/power without relying on problematic solar panels. It's already quite common.

View on HN

Growing crops for fuel is so absolutely ridiculously inefficient it's amazing anyone does it at all (It's usually not even energy-positive: the only way it makes sense is if you want to make sure you have excess food production and have something you can do with the waste).

Comparing the landuse efficiency of corn-based biomass vs PV is about 60-75x.

It just doesn't make any sense at all to use crops for energy production.

The only case where it might be viable is burning crop waste; stems of grain and maize, for example. The UK runs Drax on (imported! in oil burning ships!) sawmill waste, but that's greenwashing to me.

It definitely is. Besides that, Drax doesn't only run on waste products (that's what they'd like to make us believe), they mostly run on freshly logged timber.

Most of it, imported from the US: https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Drax-brie...

And even if it only was waste that's burned, it's IMHO incredibly stupid. We should be happy about every single gram of CO2 that's stored somewhere and use this "waste" for building insulation, paper production, soil revitalization or simply bury it.

Burning simply shouldn't happen when we have way better, cheaper, more efficient, more environmentally friendly methods of producing heat and electricity.

In a post-fossil fuel age, that crop waste will be used as a carbonaceous feedstock for things like jet fuel and what are now petrochemicals. Burning it for power will be uneconomical.

Unless you start considering carbon capture: if some direct carbon capture folly exists and you replace that folly with capturing the output of some crops-to-energy setup, then that would surely be a massive improvement over the carbon capture it replaced.

Sorry, how is this better? The whole path of [grow oats -> maintain steam power plant -> ship and burn oats] seems much harder to me than using solar cells?

What's problematic about solar panels?

There's a reasonable amount of waste biomass generated by farms that can be used in various ways without growing it specifically for that use.

People just like using "problematic" as a content-free slur that's acceptable in "progressive" circles that bypasses critical thinking.

Mainly recycling.

Even if you couldn't recycle them, they'd be a much better solution than what they replace.

The fact that you can recycle them just makes them even better.

And the problem with that? Seems we can reasonably easily recycle the vast majority of solar panels, no differently to any other electronic good.

Oats don't like hot dry areas, such as kenya in summer/dry season.

plus, burning oats is really fucking expensive, the chaff is a reasonable feed, and the straw is good bedding/binder for building stuff.

Burning for power is really a poor use, especially as it needs compressing into bricks first. Plus you only get a tiny bit of energy once a year, compared to ~1kwhr per panel per day. (depends on panel size and positioning etc etc )

No, EROEI for this is just bad if not negative. Also you do not produce any food.

What does “problematic” even mean here?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com