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.
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.
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)