1. Ethanol in gasoline is at present merely replacing an additive MBTE its not really a biofuel as such. Since it is cheaper to produce (even if subsidized) than gasoline it is helping to keep the price of fuel down.

2. Energy costs are increasing the cost of food to the consumer more than ethanol. In fact by substituting some more expensive oil byproducts with ethanol - ethanol from plants is reducing the cost of delivering food - which is big part of the cost of food.

3. Gm crops are reducing the cost of producing crops where the technology is used e.g. corn, soy and cotton and products are in later stages of development that will increase yields for crops under drought stress and reduce fertilizer inputs. The EU’s lack of a credible policy to allow GM traits to be used for food production in the EU is resulting in high food costs. Eu grain supplies would have been higher if GM crops had not been banned and production costs would have been lower.
France’s banning of Bt corn that increases corn yields by 10% is going in the wrong direction. Maybe with Gm crops the EU could have avoided removing the set-aside or conservation of land provisions and kept 10% of land out of cultivation. The net result of the banning of GM crops will continue to be higher food costs and an increasing amount of land coming under cultivation. The conversion fo land to cultivation has a far greater established impact on the environment than any unproven concerns about the effects of Gmc rops that have been sued in the US for more than 10 years without a docmented negative impact.

Even the use of hybrid or more advanced non-Gm crops in the developing world would have a dramatic impact on yields and it would be better for governments to give away hybrid seed than hand out food as for every kernel of corn seed planted you can gain 200-400 kernels of grain to feed.

I hope you will see a kernel of truth in my logic!

But the two big deal-breakers are the cost overruns (the owners of the project simply will have to promise to take care of these to get debt financing, and how do you get small shareholders to do this?), and the fact that I suspect that E.ON and DONG would both rather not have every step of the project subject to the scrutiny that a public listing entails. More importantly, Triodos and Climate Change Capital, the two big retail investors that are wheeled out habitually to get quoted about these issues, were pretty negative about large offshore projects in a Feb 24 Guardian article.

Where did you get the 3.2 million MWh production number from? I’ve seen 8.9 quoted, which seemed excessive (I believe onshore is nearer 2 million, though conditions vary).