On paper, 22M acres is enough room for 1.78 TW annualised over a year[0], which is about 61% of current global electricity demand.
I doubt they'll get close to filling this land up with PV, but perhaps at least making this much available will reduce the rate at which people ask how much land PV needs to take up.
[0] 10% capacity factor, 20% efficient: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=22+million+acres+*+10%2...
"Of the ~92 million acres of corn planted in the US each year, roughly 40 million acres (1.6% of the nation’s land) are primarily used to feed cars and raise the octane of gasoline. If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States, equivalent to nearly eight times the energy that would be needed to power all of the nation’s passenger vehicles were they electrified.
However, if we were to transition this 40 million acres are of fuel to solar+food (agrivoltaics) – we could still meet 100% of our electricity needs, and power a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles."
(solar panels produce roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn)
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-...
Hopefully for something that tastes better than corn.
If I understand right, this protest was in part due to an attempt by the (German) government to reduce the level at which farmers are being subsidised.
Reason I bring this up, is that I have heard that the US only started using corn ethanol as an excuse to keep subsidising farmers, not because it was ever a good idea.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180407183020/https://www.arb.c...
Blaming govt for water shortage despite new proactive policies like paying farmers to let fields flood (to replenish acquifiers).
No good deed goes unpunished.
There is however a special place in hell for the first person to come up with cornbread and serve it to another human being. No redeemable qualities. I’m not even sure if I would call it bread or food for that matter.
Socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
I'm not talking about eating it just as corn. It's starch. It's oil. It's food component parts to use to make things humans enjoy.
Corn is everywhere and in everything. In the US at least.
there are also other crops that are better suited for starch/oil. so ultimately, to me, any use of corn other than food is basically just finding a way to subsidize the farmers. i'm not opposed to that, but if we're paying for it anyways, why not grow something better suited for purpose rather than just shoehorning corn as the solution?
Food =/= just eat the corn as is. It's an ingredient in many many many foods. That's what I'm talking about. Starch. Oil.
And no, sweet corn (food corn for humans) is not appropriate to be used as field corn for biofuel. Too high of moisture content, even when dried. It just doesn't store well.
Finally - Per acre, you will be hard pressed to find a crop that can create as many products, including starch and oil, as corn. Please let me know what you're talking about here.
If there is a year where nationwide farm output is, due to bad luck, significantly below average, we can take the crops that were going to make biofuel and use them to make cooking oil.
(IIRC farm output is always somewhat irregular, so this is a fairly plausible scenario).
If that's what's being defended against, it doesn't matter so much if it's a bit meh, it matters that you'd convinced farmers to plant the crops before they knew they'd be eaten. A government can also pay for overproduction of normal crops, but might want to reduce the cost of that by asking for a dual use crop.
I'm still not convinced doing this with corn is good, but it's at least the start of an argument that might convince me.
Also, except for emergencies, the corn wouldn't be diverted but the farmers would plant a different variety or different crop the next year.
> If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States
Isn't really accurate. It could never provide that, simply because solar is too intermittent. With (theoretically huuuuuge batteries) it could perhaps, but those don't exist. So it couldn't.
The batteries exist of course. Tesla ships 40GWh a year of them, and they are scaling up the next Megapack manufacturing facility in China.
So people get rich making battery factories. So what?
They've been found to:
- improve soil conditions under them
- reduce water evaporation when installed over canals etc.
- provide habitat for certain kinds of farm and wild animals (much like sunken ships provide habitat for certain marine animals)
- provide insulation for structures that have them installed on the roofs
EDIT: I just realized that Wolfram does the conversion automatically, that's really cool.
Seems like the lower numbers come from older, obsolete PV technologies. Lots of improvement since even 2015.
At the area of land we're talking about (and the location of the land), dust (or cleaning), abrasive sand, lightning and hail are all going to be an issue for the panel lifetimes, if not their efficiency.
They're mostly not in areas with tornadoes, which is nice, but I think 30 years is pretty optimistic.
Solar can supply about ten times our current needs with 1% of the surface of the Earth, a completely circular system where PV today makes PV tomorrow only has recurring costs of (1/(EROEI+1)) of the total output — x10 EROEI becomes 9% of the lifetime output of a cell being used to make the next cell.
The "eco" side pushes solar and wind for everything and thinks nuclear plants inevitably explode. The "right wing" side pushes coal exclusively because it's sad that the few thousand coal miners left could lose their jobs.
Nobody's weighing these things with fair metrics.
Nuclear power plants without passive safety features need extra redundancy on the cooling systems, e.g. you need backup generators. There is no way that should add billions of dollars to the price of the plant.
They cost billions of dollars more because competitors (primarily coal and natural gas) lobby for rules that make them cost more on purpose, because they don't want to compete with a technology that should have a similar construction cost and negligible fuel cost. Especially when they're the suppliers of the fuel.
Fortunately for them nuclear is scary and then you can lobby not just for safety measures that make sense but also for ones with poor cost benefit ratios that only serve to make the plants uneconomically expensive. Then the coal companies shrug and say the market has decided.