Ethanol

I didn't get a very big response to my last poll question about Ethanol, but I'm going to talk about it a little bit anyway. Depending on who you talk to Ethanol is either the ultimate answer to every energy problem we face as a nation, and possibly, World, or it is a complete hoax.

Probably it is somewhere closer to the middle, though, a little more on the hoax side than the other. While Ethanol can be burned as fuel in certain vehicles, it is not really all it's cracked up to be. It is just a little bit cheaper than gas, and is supposed to burn cleaner, but you also don't get as many miles to the gallon from Ethanol as from Gasoline, so it won't save you any money, and as I've said before, if you want something like this to be embraced, it needs to be both better than what we have now, and cheaper, or at least, more cost effective.

There is, of course, another reason why it can't be the answer to all of our energy problems, it comes from corn, and corn has to be grown. And we are talking about a LOT of corn if we were going to make any serious headway in using Ethanol to replace current oil usage, and completely switching over? Not even remotely possible, there is no way to produce enough for that.

Now, nothing is being harmed by using some of this Ethanol as a fuel additive to lessen the amount of Gasoline that is being used in cars, but it won't make much of a dent, so isn't there a better option? Sure there is. One place that we could make a really big difference in the use of Petroleum is in mass energy production, or electricity for your home. And the way to do it is as old as time itself. I speak, of course, of Solar Energy. I have heard many times that Solar energy isn't viable on a grand scale because it would take so many square miles of solar panels to replace a single power plant. This is silly of course, why would you put all the solar panels in one place? You wouldn't of course, you would put them on each individual house or building, thus, generating a lot of electricity from surface area that already sits out in the sun all day, but at this point, to no avail. If Al Gore were really serious about saving the environment, he would take all the proceeds from his book and his movie, and any other benefits he comes up with (if they actually make money, unlike "Live Earth") and start buying regular folks, like you and me, solar panels, that way he could actually do something that would have a positive impact, and not be nearly so annoying to the rest of us.

While I realize that Solar Energy might not answer the problems of using gasoline in cars, it would still go a very long way in lessening the amount of oil used in power production and industry. Besides, if your house was solar powered, and therefore you didn't have to pay for your electricity, plugging in an electric car might not seem like such a bad idea.