SUGARCANE

The UK fuel cell company Intelligent Energy has announced a new series of partnerships to bring renewable, distributed electricity to rural areas in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico:

Intelligent Energy Inc., a leading energy solutions business, today announces that it has successfully completed trials of its ethanol based fuel cell technology system. These trials show that sufficient electricity can be generated for a rural home from equipment little larger than a shoebox, using fuel derived from sugar cane.

Providing electricity to individual homes in rural communities is key to sustainable development in countries such as Brazil, which is the world's largest producer of bioethanol (35% of the global total). But it is equally applicable to the provision of distributed power throughout Latin America, large parts of which are presently experiencing difficulties in electricity supply and in which significant sections of the rural population do not have adequate power. Intelligent Energy is engaged in a partner program in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico which is focused on providing rural and urban electricity solutions.

I have been working in fits and starts on a post on ethanol for over a week now, it's a tricky business.  While it is renewable and cleaner-burning than fossil fuels, it incurs significant economic (higher production costs and consequently substantial government subsidies) and environmental costs to produce and transport.  While ethanol is overwhelmingly made from corn in the US, it is produced mostly from cheaper to produce sugarcane in Brazil, where more ethanol - about 12 billion liters annually - is produced and consumed than anywhere in the world.  While it replaces 10 billion gallons of gasoline in vehicles a year (40% of the country's total vehicle fuel consumption) and may be used increasingly to bring electricity to hard-to-reach rural areas, its history hasn't been entirely benign:

The improvement the air quality in big cities in the 1980s, following the widespread use of ethanol as car fuel, was evident to everyone; as was the degradation that followed the partial return to gasoline in the 1990s.

However, the ethanol program also brought a host of environmental and social problems of its own. Sugarcane fields are traditionally burned just before harvest, in order to remove the leaves and kill snakes. Therefore, in sugarcane-growing parts of the country, the smoke from burning fields turns the sky gray throughout the harvesting season. As winds carry the smoke into nearby towns, air pollution goes critical and respiratory problems soar. Thus, the air pollution which was removed from big cities was merely transferred to the rural areas (and multiplied). This practice has been decreasing of late, due to pressure from the public and health authorities; but the powerful sugarcane growers' lobby has managed to prevent a total ban.

The ethanol program also led to widespread replacement of small farms and varied agriculture by vast seas of sugarcane monoculture. This led to a decrease in biodiversity and further shrinkage of the residual native forests (not only from deforestation but also through fires caused by the burning of adjoining fields). The replacement of food crops by the more lucrative sugarcane has also led to a sharp increase in food prices over the last decade.

Since sugarcane only requires hand labor at harvest time, this shift also created a large population of destitute migrant workers who can only find temporary employment as cane cutters (at about US$3–5 per day) for one or two months every year. This huge social problem has contributed to political unrest and violence in rural areas, which are now plagued by recurrent farm invasions, vandalism, armed confrontations, and assassinations.

The Brazilian alcohol program has been often criticized for many motives, including excessive land use, environmental damage, displacement of food crops, reliance on misery-wage temporary labor, statism and dependency on government subsidies, etc..  On the other hand, the sugarcane agribusiness sector is politically powerful and so far it has successfully defended the program from its critics. The positive effect of the program on Brazil's overstrained foreign trade speaks louder than all its environmental and social problems.

The dysfunctional Brazilian ethanol economy is similar to ours in many ways, and will continue along the same lines for the same reasons (e.g. energy security and domestic economic interests).  While I feel decidedly ambivalent about the increased use of ethanol in general, I will say that in the case of this new technology, the potential benefits of electrifying and developing rural areas certainly helps to further justify the environmental and economic costs of increased ethanol production.