If they can hit their targets, <$200/kWh and 20,000 cycles, then they would be providing $0.01/kWh storage. At this point in time anything less than $0.05/kWh would be a winner. It would make a ~100% wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/tidal grid affordable.

So it’ll have to win on cheaper and more reliable.

That’s only “one” of the “one-two punch” that knocks biofuel out of a major role in future ground transportation.

Burn biofuel in an internal combustion engine and roughly 80% of the energy is lost, never gets used to turn the wheels.

Use PV electricity in an EV and only 10% of the energy is lost.

You’re right about some of the biofuel feedstocks. Stripping fields of crop “waste” will reduce the organic matter in soil making it necessary to use more fertilizer and increasing topsoil loss.

The exceptions are some perennial plants such as switchgrass. Switchgrass, in particular, has an extensive root system and over years improves the soil by increasing the organic content of the soil It also sequesters carbon.

Another biofuel feedstock which might actually help the soil is rapeseed/canola or other mustard plants which can be grown in between crops of wheat when the soil would normally be left bare. A inter-crop cover can protect the soil. If the seed are harvested and the stems disked back in there should be an improvement in the soil.

Biofuel is going to be only a niche player. We might need it for airplane fuel, and hopefully we can get what we need from algae. Other sources of biofuel just don’t seem to be adequate to supply very much.

I’m fairly certain we’ll get some good EV batteries in the next few years and biofuels for ground transportation will just not be needed. Electrovaya has started shipping batteries that have about 2x the capacity of the LEAF batteries. That would get us fairly close to the magic 200 mile range.

Aquion is now shipping. They make a sodium-ion battery that is made of inexpensive materials and 100% recyclable.

I believe their target price is $300/kWh and they’ve been proven out at >5,000 100% DoD cycles by independent lab testing.

At $300/kWh and 10k cycles they will be selling $0.03/kWh storage.

Nighttime wind at 5 cents or less stored for 3 cents and with some loss and overhead yields stored electricity at less than 10 cents/kWh.

Feed the grid a mixture of solar (10 cents) and wind (5 cents) and fill in with stored wind (10 cents) and we’ve hit affordable renewable. By the time you add in distribution and profits the price might be a few cents higher than the current US 12 cent average. That extra can be largely offset with efficiency.

Initially wind/solar/storage will largely offset expensive peaking power. That will bring the cost of electricity down as it is doing now in Germany. If we improve efficiency during this phase then we may never feel pain.

Prices will fall. Solar is on its way to 5 cents. Wind on its way to 3.

Aquion thinks they can increase cycle life to 20,000 and drop price below $200/kWh. That would make storage less than 1 cent.

http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/4/4/044003/fulltext/

I will say that woody waste streams, including responsibly harvesting good old kindling, could be better exploited.

“If you were to take every gram of crops produced anywhere in the world for all purposes — and that includes every grape, every ton of wheat, every ton of soybeans and corn — and you were to use that for biofuels and essentially stop eating, those crops would produce about 14 percent of world energy,” says Timothy Searchinger, an associate research scholar at Princeton University.

G. Philip Robertson and colleagues at Michigan State University’s Kellogg Biological Station have been looking at plants that don’t require farm fields.

“First, we discovered that the grasses and flowers that take over fields once you stop farming produce a fair amount of biomass, especially if you provide them a little bit of fertilizer,” Robertson says.

Robertson and his colleagues surveyed the Midwest acre by acre and identified 27 million acres of marginal farmland where these plants could grow, and where the acreage falls into a compact enough area that someone might want to build a refinery to produce biofuels.

They figured that it would become too expensive to transport this heavy and bulky plant material more than 50 miles, from field to refinery.

“At the end of the day, we discovered we could produce enough biomass to supply 30 or so of these potential biorefineries,” Robertson says.

The 27 million acres identified in the latest study would provide less than 0.5 percent of (US) national energy demand,

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/16/169538570/could-some-midwest-land-support-new-biofuel-refineries

Obviously few, if any, parts of the world would go 100% solar. A mix of inputs lowers the cost of storage. Solar might end up contributing 25% to 40% of the total supply.

We could put that amount of solar on rooftops, over parking lots and landfills and shade parts of highways where drivers encounter stop and go traffic. We probably need to use zero farmland for solar.