Biofuels shine a lot more in the transport sector than outside it. As biologists say, it’s really there niche. One thing I also didn’t mention is the air transport industry where weight becomes a much bigger deal. Biofuels shine even more there.

It’s been shown that when you burn biofuels in an electricity generating plant rather than a vehicle, you can achieve a higher thermodynamic efficiency, because you have so much ability to optomise.

However, the principal advantages of biofuels are weight, energy storage and use of existing transport infrastructure. None of these really matter in large-scale power generation.

As far as I can tell, the great-unsung champion of direct renewable electricity generation is…wind power (with a minor credit to hydro and solar thermal).

Aluminium smelting is an interesting case because it’s so incredibly energy hungry. Apparently Australia currently ships a lot of its Al3+ to Iceland, because of their abundance of geothermal. So the solution with Al3+ seems to be to ship it to where ever has the cheapest air pollution free power. Of course, you also want to recycle every single aluminium can you can…yes you can! (I sense a jingle coming on…)