Clean energy is slowly become more competitive with traditional fossil fuel. As uplifting as these recent trends are, the potential deal-breaker is still how to store it for when we need it. Electricity generated by wind and solar are amazing new sources of electricity to feed into grids that can take the power as it comes out of the turbine or photovoltaic array, but what about portability? What about when we want to take that power and use it later?

With Al Gore’s recent change of heart about the subsidization of corn ethanol, and the price of batteries, while expected to fall, still remaining prohibitively high due to growing demand -a great investment opportunity, but you still can’t drive a semi truck with a full load very far on even the best lithium ion cell – we’re left with few viable options in portable energy sources to consider seriously. Anyway, even though batteries are grouped in as a power source, it’s worth reminding readers that they are technically a storage technology rather than a fuel…electricity from some source is still needed to charge the batteries.

The “Hydrogen Highway” is fraught with problems and has yet to materialize (though here’s an interesting new development), leaving biodiesel as one of the only players left in the game, and with the subsidization of the oil and gas industry it’s currently still more expensive to procure than fossil diesel, unless you’re making your own from left-over McDonald’s grease, which just isn’t scalable. (more…)