In the US, we use a lot of prime farmland to grow corn that we turn into ethanol - 30,000,000 acres. Thirty million acres!
That ethanol is combined with gas (making the gas less efficient, by the way) and powers our cars in the US.
If you look at the number of miles the ethanol powers in the US, and calculate how many acres of solar we’d need to power electric cars to go that number of miles, we’d need to convert less than a quarter of a million of those acres to solar. So let’s round up from 214,000 acres to the 250,000 because… inefficiencies, or whatever.
So we could gain 29,750,000 acres of land to grow more food or whatever and stop growing corn to turn into ethanol just to burn it in our cars.
For that matter, if we wanted to use that ethanol land (JUST the land we’re using for ethanol) to power ALL cars in the US, switching everyone over to electric, it would only take about two million acres. Sure, 2,000,000 acres is a lot, but that would still be freeing up TWENTY EIGHT MILLION ACRES of land we’re using JUST to grow corn we turn into ethanol.
It does ignore anything like the chaos of forcing everyone to buy a new electric car, setting that infrastructure up - I’m not saying this would be easy, but it is stunning how much land we could stop abusing to grow corn to burn in our cars.
Theres a lot of misunderstanding going on here about both corn and solar power.
Corn is not something that requires ideal or fertile real estate. People imagine corn being grown in the stereotypical midwestern river-adjacent and particularly fertile type of places, like Iowa or Ohio or whatever. The reality is that modern corn production requires a shitload of artificial nitrogen fertilization, so the actual fertility of the land is virtually unimportant. Believe it or not, Texas is actually one of the most productive places for corn farming, and in particularly hot and arid areas where you wouldnt be farming much else. More like typical ranching land, not prime farming land.
Now with solar power, at the current levels of efficiency (and unlike corn), having a cloudy day is a major killer. UV intensity at high elevation can be virtually nothing when it gets a little cloudy. Whereas on a sunny say it would be extremely high. So you need ideally somewhere that is as high altitude as possible, but where it is also sunny almost all the time. There are not a lot of places that meet that description, and even the few places that do are largely very expensive to acquire land in because people want to build houses and hotels and golf courses and whatever else in (or adjacent to) the mountains. Take Pueblo, CO, for example. It’s one of the solar hubs of the US. But its difficult to expand from there because you can either go east, down in elevation, and increase the number of cloudy days. Or you can try to go west and everything becomes exponentially more expensive the closer you get to the Rockies.
More importantly though, corn and solar production necessitate two completely different environments. No one is growing corn in Pueblo, and you wont find many solar fields in places where corn is grown effectively. Because a lot of the time people grow corn where it rains often, therefore those places have many more cloudy days in a year. Realistically you cant just take corn fields and turn them into solar fields
Mandating solar PV in all building codes nationwide, and incentivizing onshoring of all of the processes that go into manufacturing solar PV panels (including using trade protectionism practices such as tariffs AFTER WE ALREADY HAVE PROCESSING AND MANUFACTURING CAPABILITIES IN THE USA) will do wonders for helping average people transition away from fossil fuel Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars to EVs.
Many people who cry foul about EVs and renewables adding too much load to a grid that is too old and just can’t handle it forget the main counter to disarm their arguments: colocating generation with utilization.
Having solar PV (and other renewable) generation closest to where that power wants to be used is the best for the grid infrastructure (maybe not the grid investors) because it reduces residential/commercial load while maintaining the needs of the original giga users of the grid: Industry.
There are solutions to SO many of today’s problems. We just have politicians that are bought and sold by billionaires and their corporations who won’t do the public’s bidding. Voting progressive politicians in, and preferably ones who vocally claim they’re Democratic Socialist or similar, is the strongest way we push back against Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Tech, and all the other mega industries.
In the US, we use a lot of prime farmland to grow corn that we turn into ethanol - 30,000,000 acres. Thirty million acres!
That ethanol is combined with gas (making the gas less efficient, by the way) and powers our cars in the US.
If you look at the number of miles the ethanol powers in the US, and calculate how many acres of solar we’d need to power electric cars to go that number of miles, we’d need to convert less than a quarter of a million of those acres to solar. So let’s round up from 214,000 acres to the 250,000 because… inefficiencies, or whatever.
So we could gain 29,750,000 acres of land to grow more food or whatever and stop growing corn to turn into ethanol just to burn it in our cars.
For that matter, if we wanted to use that ethanol land (JUST the land we’re using for ethanol) to power ALL cars in the US, switching everyone over to electric, it would only take about two million acres. Sure, 2,000,000 acres is a lot, but that would still be freeing up TWENTY EIGHT MILLION ACRES of land we’re using JUST to grow corn we turn into ethanol.
It does ignore anything like the chaos of forcing everyone to buy a new electric car, setting that infrastructure up - I’m not saying this would be easy, but it is stunning how much land we could stop abusing to grow corn to burn in our cars.
If what you say is accurate, the other benefit would be that they wouldn’t even need prime, fertile real estate.
They’d just need any space with good sun capture.
Theres a lot of misunderstanding going on here about both corn and solar power.
Corn is not something that requires ideal or fertile real estate. People imagine corn being grown in the stereotypical midwestern river-adjacent and particularly fertile type of places, like Iowa or Ohio or whatever. The reality is that modern corn production requires a shitload of artificial nitrogen fertilization, so the actual fertility of the land is virtually unimportant. Believe it or not, Texas is actually one of the most productive places for corn farming, and in particularly hot and arid areas where you wouldnt be farming much else. More like typical ranching land, not prime farming land.
Now with solar power, at the current levels of efficiency (and unlike corn), having a cloudy day is a major killer. UV intensity at high elevation can be virtually nothing when it gets a little cloudy. Whereas on a sunny say it would be extremely high. So you need ideally somewhere that is as high altitude as possible, but where it is also sunny almost all the time. There are not a lot of places that meet that description, and even the few places that do are largely very expensive to acquire land in because people want to build houses and hotels and golf courses and whatever else in (or adjacent to) the mountains. Take Pueblo, CO, for example. It’s one of the solar hubs of the US. But its difficult to expand from there because you can either go east, down in elevation, and increase the number of cloudy days. Or you can try to go west and everything becomes exponentially more expensive the closer you get to the Rockies.
More importantly though, corn and solar production necessitate two completely different environments. No one is growing corn in Pueblo, and you wont find many solar fields in places where corn is grown effectively. Because a lot of the time people grow corn where it rains often, therefore those places have many more cloudy days in a year. Realistically you cant just take corn fields and turn them into solar fields
Mandating solar PV in all building codes nationwide, and incentivizing onshoring of all of the processes that go into manufacturing solar PV panels (including using trade protectionism practices such as tariffs AFTER WE ALREADY HAVE PROCESSING AND MANUFACTURING CAPABILITIES IN THE USA) will do wonders for helping average people transition away from fossil fuel Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars to EVs.
Many people who cry foul about EVs and renewables adding too much load to a grid that is too old and just can’t handle it forget the main counter to disarm their arguments: colocating generation with utilization.
Having solar PV (and other renewable) generation closest to where that power wants to be used is the best for the grid infrastructure (maybe not the grid investors) because it reduces residential/commercial load while maintaining the needs of the original giga users of the grid: Industry.
There are solutions to SO many of today’s problems. We just have politicians that are bought and sold by billionaires and their corporations who won’t do the public’s bidding. Voting progressive politicians in, and preferably ones who vocally claim they’re Democratic Socialist or similar, is the strongest way we push back against Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Tech, and all the other mega industries.