GigaOM Show: Vinod Khosla on Funding Cleantech
Controversial cleantech investor Vinod Khosla chats with us about the future of energy innovation, biofuels, hybrid cars, and what’s really going to make a difference for climate change. Download it here.
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Primary goal of ethanol was to displace oil. Coal was not an issue, though admittedly it great increases the carbon footprint of ethanol.
If ethanol “ran the numbers”, they’d realize the whole thing makes no sense. That’s pretty sad, but if you ran the number on PV and some other strategies, they’d be pretty sad too.
I think I get Khosla a little bit more. He’s emphasizing carbon reduction, not oil depletion. PHEVs main benefit is oil displacement, not carbon reduction (at least for now).
The issue is that we still have not included the full cost of our doing in anything we buy. If in fact the economic cost of bad environmental behaviour would be accounted for, we would be on renewable energies and ethanol is one of them.
PV is likely not one of them until we come up with a low energy conversion process for solar rays, wait, ehm, nature does that already, it is called, like, photosynthesis. Geez, does not need solar panels and semiconductors (and melting sand).
Green energy is definitely the best solution in most cases. Technology like solar energy, wind power, fuel cells, zaps electric vehicles, EV hybrids, etc have come so far recently. Green energy even costs way less than oil and gas in many cases.