Hard To Get Excited About Bio-Energy

Here’s a tome (700 pages!) on bio-energy for anyone looking for a comprehensive study on the subject; an enormous amount of time must have gone into this.  Personally, I don’t see the reason to get excited about any of this. 

Given the large and ever-growing hunger for energy on the planet, is it conceivable that our species will use the required half a billion acres of arable farmland, build all the agricultural machines required, use incalculably large amounts of water and fertizer, confront the numerous ecological issues all this creates—only to deal with the tiny efficiency with which sunlight can be transformed into useful chemical energy via photosynthesis?

No.  There is no reason to believe that bio-energy has any real future, in a world where, for instance, wind turbines convert about 20% of the energy in their swept area into electricity, run at capacity factors that often exceed 30%, and are getting bigger and less expensive every year.  Of course, biofuels replace gasoline and diesel rather than electricity, but lots of cheap available wind means lots of capability to charge electric vehicles.