To have any chance on the market, the price per protein content of the insect larvae must be at least twice lower than that of chicken meat. Therefore it must be about the same as for legumes like beans or lentils.
To be able to judge whether investing in such a thing is worthwhile, you need a very accurate prediction of the production costs, to determine whether it is possible to match the legumes in price per protein content.
I would be very wary about the risk that the estimation of the future production costs might be exceedingly optimistic.
Currently some cereals are the cheapest source of proteins suitable for human consumption, but they cannot provide much more than a half of the daily protein intake of a human, because they lack lysine, so they must be combined with a more expensive source of proteins, like meat, legumes, or perhaps insect larvae.
Nearly nobody has an objection to eating legumes (I am ignoring, among other things, people on ultra-low-carb diets, specific allergies, and Ashkenazi Jews during Pesach), so an improved yield of legumes, or a reduction in water usage, or a tolerance for greater temperature extremes, or... would be extremely valuable.
If they could come to be just the same price as "ethical" chicken that would be amazing. I think it's been shown that there's not much market for meat replacements at a premium (like impossible and beyond). But I can't imagine there's not an insane market at the parity. I know I would buy insect burgers for my family at least once or twice a week if they had comparable quality to chicken and similarly priced.
But biomass being converted into electricity is horribly inefficient.
Even in CHP?
And that optimistic 2% efficiency for plants is just the energy conversion to grow the actual plants. Then to convert it into electricity requires it to go through a power plant which often have lower efficiencies of say 30%. If it is in a co-generation facility, it may have upwards of say 80%. Which sounds nice, but when you multiply those efficiencies and end up with in the best case, something like 1.6% efficiency which is terrible.
And that is to ignore the other major factor which is that burning biomass causes major pollution.
Fossil fuels are just convenient biomass that have been given the luxury of hundreds of millions of years to compress into dense hydrocarbons which make a convenient fuel source. We don't have this luxury when it comes to creating new biomass.
The best aspect of biomass is that it is freely available to everyone. Anyone can gather sticks to burn.
However, the parts of the world that still heavily rely on these methods for heating their homes and are used for cooking unfortunately suffer the consequences of breathing all of the smoke in over the years.
The article is aboit dedicated biomass for electricity production, which given the cheapness of solar and wind is a little like dunking on steam-powered cars. I'm not aware of anyone arguing for that as an approach. We did these sums a couple of decades ago.
On the other hand, wwste food, sewage, manure, and various other things that would become methane are useful to capture as it can be GHG negative comparrd woth letting it rot. That is also "biomass".
I work with creating efficient closed loop food production systems.
Nerdy people on message boards will adopt extreme positions. The argument against meat is that animal fodder is inefficient and everything would be better if we just ate soy, peas and beans. The same argument would be made against your idea.
I think it’s dumb to grow crops to stretch the viability of ICE engines in cars. But growing crops to produce upstream value, whether that’s steak or food for my steak isn’t an issue for me, and probably isn’t a problem for 98% of people once they get over the “yuck, bugs”.
On top of that, food margins aren’t huge and you’re aiming for the low budget market, not a lot of money to be made there. And the optics aren’t great, lots of people will find your product repulsive and at a low price it will look like you’re trying to feed bugs to the poor.
If insects as food ever becomes significant, it probably won’t be the first to market that will succeed but a later breakout learning how to be successful after somebody else tries and fails several times.