edentSolar and batteries can power the world
Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...
Trading some corn-ethanol land for solar offers ‘tremendous opportunity’ | Cornell Chronicle
In the U.S., strategically converting a small fraction of land used to grow corn for ethanol to solar facilities could vastly increase energy production per hectare, as well as provide ecological benefits and financial resiliency for farmers.
What does the 1% of land used to grow corn have to do specifically with solar and batteries? Solar doesn't need to be on the 15% arable land at all.
The corn doesn't just produce ethanol, which just utilizes the starch/sugar. The protein, fat, fiber is eaten by livestock in some form like distillers grains.
And governments like to have food security , and having secondary uses for an abundance of food in the good times is more convenient than storing cheese in caves , and in case of an emergency shortage the production is already there without having to rip up solar panels to grow food.
My conclusion is you're conflating issues (solar and ethanol) unnecessarily.
No no, that argument is pretty old now. The amount of fuel you GROW on your own continent at any single or double digit percentage during wartime-anytime is probably a good long-term research project that shouldn't be interrupted by people online.
Then please explain, to me he brought up an unrelated point about ethanol (which is often poorly understood and mischaracterized anyways) consuming a portion of agriculturally productive land. Which BTW this agricultural land that produces ethanol is probably not even close to the best place in the country for industrial scale solar from a LOT of perspectives.
My "try to understand" take: We subsidize corn, then use it yo make a less efficient fuel. The money involved in this process likely takes away from subsidies to other forms of energy. There are a great many activities we do not subsidize, but solar is one that if we did, would produce an outsized benefit to society. And the more we do, the better. Redirecting an ethanol subsidy to solar would be a far more beneficial long term strategy for energy independence and overall standard of living in the US. Going all in on Solar would be a transformative and likely relatively short investment period that would last and benefit a long time. We have done many large scale infrastructure projects in the US, and it is frustrating to see the resistance to this one, being both less disruptive and more "all around win" than any other i can think of.
This is a fair point as it's not just simply using ethanol for gasoline. This article goes into more depth about it: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2501605122
There's lot of factors at play here:
- Location for generating PV
- Redistribution of food (both for livestock and human) production
- Environmental impacts of PV vs livestock vs depletion of native prairies
Point still stands...if you replaced all of the land used to produce ethanol with PV, you would create a surplus of energy that is higher than anything we could imaginably consume today (hint - China is essentially already doing this)