The BIGGEST problem with clean energy

This is why I, as a chemist, have always lowkey supported the industry around burning renewable fuels - things like ethanol and charcoal-based fuels. Plants are more efficient at capturing and converting energy than even the best solar cells, chemicals like cellulose are more energy-dense than even the best batteries, and most or all of the carbon emissions are effectively negated by the fact that you used plants to capture that very carbon from the atmosphere in the first place!

The trade-offs are:
incomplete combustion can lead to carbon emissions that are more dangerous to the atmosphere (things like methane, instead of CO2)
destruction of natural fauna that use the growing plants as their habitat

other pros to consider:
not needing as many rare resources mined from the ground
not needing as many toxic resources that can go back into the ground


Ideally, the future of energy storage is going to be chemical, and the best way to produce it will be by genetically engineering an existing plant to fit our needs. NOT by doing more studies into obscure transition metal batteries. Hydrogen is a good bet for chemical storage with our current technology, but hydrogen is hard to store and still has a significant loss of energy to produce.

personally I like the bio-algae ideas but they are still stuck in the "convert it to biodiesel" stages as opposed to just filtering it out and burning it as fuel (then re-using the ashes as fertilizer, obviously, once you account for other things like pH and chlorine / iodine loss during burning)