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> As of 2014, how do you power trucks, tractors, cargo ships, and planes on solar?

Using bioengineered microbes to efficiently produce ethanol or diesel directly: http://www.jouleunlimited.com/...

The microbes don't have to produce leaf or stem structures, and are genetically engineered to emit the fuel molecules directly, like yeast emits alcohol. Except yeast poison themselves when the alcohol content in fermentation gets too high. The Joule Unlimited process draws off the fuel continuously, so the microbes can keep working. The efficiency limit is around 6% by this process, where standard photosynthesis is about 1%. Since the microbes are a contained system, you can use crappy dry land, rather than food-growing cropland, like we do for vehicle ethanol today.

Down the road, Joules Unlimited will produce most, if not all of our ethanol. And all without a subsidy. Why? Because they use our SEWAGE to create ethanol AND diesel at a cheaper cost. In fact, they claim to produce ethanol at less than $1.28/gal and diesel at less than $50 BBLE.

And to make matters interesting, they are scaling up. They have multiple foreign investors who want to spread this around the world.

There is a company who has engineered a form of algae that can produce diesel fuel http://www.jouleunlimited.com/. These technologies need investment and need to come to fruition quickly.

Which helps prove my point, if this works. The way that shrimp farming works in Asia and South America is HORRIBLE to the water and to the shrimp. If we quit importing their shrimp, we will see this destructive approach plummet.

Now what is needed for this shrimp waste is to feed it to another system that can make good use of it and change it from a waste water into a profit center.
We need automation to solve a lot of our issues. We used to be the MOST automated nation in the world. Then between unions and executives that did not want to spend the money, we lost ground.

By way of comparison, Cornell University’s David Pimentel, an authority on ethanol, says that one acre of corn produces less than half as much energy, equivalent to only 328 barrels. If a few hundred barrels of crude sounds modest, recall that millions of acres of prime U.S. farmland are now used to make corn ethanol.

A remarkable number, but as far as I can find Pimentel claims no such thing about BARRELS per acre, but I can find that number in GALLONS per acre per year, e.g., see http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm. So 328 gallons of ethanol per acre = 7.8 barrels of ethanol per acre per year

Among his [Pimentel's] findings are:
An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel’s analysis. Thus, even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol.

Joule Unlimited's website does says "20,000 gallons of renewable ethanol or hydrocarbons per acre annually" ( http://www.jouleunlimited.com/news/2009/joule-biotechnologies-introduces-revolutionary-process-producing-renewable-transportation- )

So one thought has occurred to me. If this technology involves growing green gunk in vertical clear walled tanks, then perhaps they have chosen to talk about the yield per tank in terms of tank horizontal footprint, i.e the amount of light input coming in the side of 1 square foot of tank horizontal footprint could be many times the amount hitting just the top... I can imagine a tank fourteen feet tall, 3 feet wide, but only 4 inches deep. So its footprint is only 1 square foot, but it catches 30 square feet of light if at Boston's 42 degrees latitude (or heck, 60 feet if one reflects light in on the back side.)

Regarding the pilot plant, they're hiring :

http://www.jouleunlimited.com/careers/ppe

http://www.jouleunlimited.com/careers/lppo

Regarding the pilot plant, they're hiring :

http://www.jouleunlimited.com/careers/ppe

http://www.jouleunlimited.com/careers/lppo

Their web site just screams "scam" Also, that $30 per barrel figure is bogus: "We estimate our costs for diesel to be as low as $30 per barrel equivalent. This is based on an industrial-scale plant of at least 1,000 acres, producing our commercial target of 15,000 gallons diesel/acre/year, and taking into account our total expected costs and existing, applicable credits.". In other words, even if it works, it's a scheme to exploit subsidies.

Also, they announced this before, 18 months ago, and still don't have a demo. They should at least be showing a panel or two by now.

It's not a fundamentally hopeless idea. It's basically a scheme for photosynthesis inside what look like hot-water solar heating panels. Photosynthesis is neither fast nor efficient. The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar powered photosynthesis is 11%. That's an upper limit, and the Joule people don't give the actual number for their process, which has to be lower. Photovoltaic panels are already above 11%.

It's not clear that their system would be much cheaper than photovoltaics per unit area. Half the cost of solar panel installations is in the installation job itself. Solar hot water heating panels that last for a decade or two aren't cheap. (The low-end ones tend to rot, be torn up in storms, or crack as the plasticizers are cooked out.) These guys aren't just heating; they have a chemical reaction going inside the things. They'll probably have to flush their system occasionally, and they'll need more pumps, plumbing, and controls than simple hot water panels.

Ethanol from cellulose (not corn) is probably more promising. That works now, but it's marginal on cost. It runs off agricultural waste like straw or cheap crops grown in open fields; you don't have to build giant farms of panels.