Advertiser science writer and columnist Jan TenBruggencate provides a brief summary of the big interest in Hawaii, as elsewhere, in alternative energy including windfarms, solar cells, and ethanol. It leaves a question in the mind of The Tracker, who is old enough to remember the old C&H jingles and their closing refrain, “pure cane sugar from Hawai…i.” Sugar cane has in recent decades faded dramatically as a major player in Hawaiian farming. The question unanswered in Jan’s column is whether, with Brazil as an example, ethanol could get the old cane fields back into business. Just wondering….
Other alternative energy news: Philadelphia Daily News Peter Duranine on a New York company’s plant that converts dead turkeys, and other organic material, into diesel fuel. The process takes a lot of heat and it’s not clear here how much fossil energy goes into that side of the energy equation compared to the biofuel kilocalories out the other.
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