As an energy economist would you mind commenting on Elon Musk's assertion that the best case with a perfect plant for making biofuel, the efficiency per unit of land used is still 2 orders of magnitude less than capturing energy with solar cells?
He also claimed that for most nuclear power plants, if you covered them and their exclusion zones with solar cells, you'd generate more energy than the plant itself generates.
(Both assertions seem pretty strong. Both were made during the interview at Oxford that was put online yesterday.)
Regarding Elon Musk, I think it is irrelevant if you get more energy out of solar panels vs. biofuels as that is simply the wrong question because you’re getting two very different types of energy out of each. Solar produces electric power which needs to be moved across a large capital intensive grid and also has to have supply and demand balance in realtime, solar has problems producing power when it is needed. Biofuels are high density portable energy sources that work with a trillion dollar base of invested infrastructure.
The portability/infrastructure view can be seen by a market based approach.
One MMBTU of natural gas delivered at Henry Hub, sells for $3.50
A Barrel of Brent oil sells for $110 a barrel
6 mmbtu’s of Natural gas has the same energy content of a barrel of Brent, or you could buy the energy content of a barrel of oil for $21 with natural gas. The FORM that a unit of energy comes in matters a lot.
Regarding Elon Musk’s claim on nuclear power plants I think there must be an assumption he’s made that I’m not aware of. On it’s face I don’t believe this is true, there likely is an important assumption missing like perhaps every single inch of the site is covered. Also even if the absolute outputs of energy are the same because solar isn’t going to always deliver a steady planed amount of power output, peaker power plants are going to be needed when days are shady etc. changing the economics.
The FORM of energy matters, Nuclear power plants run for months at full capacity and when they need to be out of service that is planned ahead of time to occur during times of the year when demand is lower. My job at Enron was to know everything about every Nuclear power plant in the country because there was a lot of money to be made in predicting if one wouldn’t be able to produce.
The compressed air storage investment that PG recently made is all about the timing and form of energy, being able to shift those has a LOT of economics value.
PG
Musk's assertion regarding biofuels was correct, but I think it was made within the context of using them as fuel. He didn't discuss many side-products that are generated during the production of biofuels.
The problem with counting "side effect" products is nobody ever takes into account the supply/demand for that product. Sure making enough biofuel for the entire US produces 100 tons of X. But if the worldwide demand for X is 5 tons, then you've now generated 95 tons of waste that needs to be disposed of.
However, the major side product of corn based biofules is distillers grain which is animal feed for Cows/pigs. There is enough demand there to actually consume all of the distillers grain produced.
He also claimed that for most nuclear power plants, if you covered them and their exclusion zones with solar cells, you'd generate more energy than the plant itself generates.
He also claimed that for most nuclear power plants, if you covered them and their exclusion zones with solar cells, you'd generate more energy than the plant itself generates.
(Both assertions seem pretty strong. Both were made during the interview at Oxford that was put online yesterday.)