Comments by "roidroid" (@roidroid) on "Путеводитель по энергии на Земле — Джошуа Снайдеман" video.
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vanarcken113 Sadly what i said is indeed true. Algae farming (& biofuels in general) and solar power are competing interests of mine, a few years back i was closely following a fair few algae projects (as my old videos attest to), and i still occasionally tinker with algae-tech ideas to this day.
Algae is the fastest growing plant on the planet, it's the best, but photosynthesis isn't particularly efficient compared to man-made tech. It's great for producing liquid fuels though (ie: for vehicles), very simple. That's why there's so much buzz about algae, exciting stuff. But everything has it's limitations. It's more than just great for fuel, but also for food, and even carbon sequestration. This stuff has a lot of uses, but it doesn't do everything.
If you search for Algae Thermodynamics there's a fair few articles which will catch you up.
But as a quick explanation: Think of how much land is required to produce X amount of biofuel for combustion cars (wikipedia has some good biofuel yeild numbers, algae is the best). Then compare to the same land-area covered in solar panels charging electric cars. It's almost no comparison, the electric cars come out way in front, mostly because the thermodynamic limitations of photosynthesis just can't be routed around :(. You can easily charge your own electric car from the solar panels on your roof, but to grow enough biofuel to fuel your own car takes a relatively gigantic amount of land (i'd have to dig through my old notes to give you the exact land-size required), the yields are super low.
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