Countries all over the world are providing bountiful incentives for solar power plants, especially solar PV based power plants. I am wondering why such generous incentives should not be provided to research in biofuels as well? I do not however see it happening in any country, expect to some extent, in the United States.

Well, one would have expected countries such as India that are highly reliant on other countries for almost all their oil would be keen on putting in significant investments into biofuels, but as this post suggests, they apparently are not:

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Most power in India is produced by coal and hydroelectric power � both of which are available in plenty within India (yes, we import over 15% of our coal requirements, but we actually have reserves that will last us about 100 years at current levels of consumption). On the other hand, we have much less oil and import about 70% of our requirements (though it is nice to know that there have been some significant oil finds in the recent past by Cairn Energy and more recently by Reliance).

India uses about 3.2 million barrels per day of oil, and about 2 million barrels per day are imported. At $75 a barrel, that�s $150 million per day, or $4.5 billion per year, or over $50 billion per year. Our FDI every year is about $30 billion., which means our import bill on oil easily wipes out all the gains we made on FDI.

If our dependence on foreign countries is much higher for oil than for electricity, one would expect an equally high thrust to be provided by the government for the progress of biofuels as it is provided for renewable electricity. But I do not find an equal thrust.

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I am from India and I can fully relate to what the author says. My country recently had the National Solar Mission in which the government plans to give hefty subsidy in the form of feed-in-tariffs to those putting up solar power plants. The government justifies such external incentives in the form of investment for the future. My question is, why cannot the government provide - through some form of subsidy - a similar incentive for research into jatropha? The current state of research in jatropha in countries such as India is laughable. Which is why I ask why there cannot be a National Jatropha Mission when there has been a National Solar Mission?

Can any of you share any experiences in your countries where the government has been more proactive in assisting biofuel research?

Here is a link that might be useful: Jatropha