Reply To: Focus fusion and transportation

[belbear]

Rematog wrote: Just “Food” for thought…..

I just attended a seminar on biofuels….

Switchgrass is one of the leading contenders for biofuel crops (as opposed to wood waste from logging).

To generate the 5 MW that a FF module would, you would need, roughly, 2,900 acres of switchgrass growing. At the very least, an alternate use for this land would be grazing and forage…. so it will reduce potential food production.

This assumes a reasonably efficient boilers/turbines (10,250 Btu/kw heat rate) and…. very high crop yield (no crop failures, storm damage, etc) and low spoilage of the switchgrass crop.. remember, very large quanties (small mountains) of “dead grass” would have to be stored between harvests to fuel a boiler running 365 days a year.

Something to chew on….

This scheme, as any biofuel scheme, assumes you have lots and lots of otherwise useless land available to grow this grass on. I live in a country where every acre of land already has a use. So we have to import all our biofuels from countries like Brazil, where they have lots of useless rainforest to make room for biofuel farms… :-/