Growing plants to make electricity is a more efficient and environmentally sound way to power vehicles than biofuels, according to a study meant to spark a debate over energy policy. The study’s authors modeled how far different classes of cars could go based on the available energy from a unit of land and found that bioelectricity–burning biomass to make electricity–far outperforms ethanol. The paper, published on Thursday in Science, found that bioelectricity delivered 81 percent more distance per unit area of crop land than ethanol. Greenhouse gas emissions per area of land were 100 percent less than cellulosic ethanol. (Click here for PDF of results.) In one example, they found that a small truck powered by bioelectricity could travel almost 15,000 miles compared with 8,000 comparable miles for an internal combustion equivalent. Click on the image to see how bioenergy and biofuels compare for transportation. (Credit: UC Merced) Making electricity from biomass, such as switchgrass, is made by burning the plants to make steam to turn an electricity turbine. That electricity could be used to charge up a plug-in electric car. The starting point for the study is that there’s a limit to the […]