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Comment by streetfighter64 | Hacker News Reader

Look man, why haven't you done the math? It's your argument after all. Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power. Plus you need a battery bank to store it during the day, supposing you're charging at night.

So, now you do the math how many trucks and how much area for solar panels a typical military has.

I don't need to do any calculations for combustion engines: IT'S WHAT THE MILITARY IS USING RIGHT NOW TODAY!

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Just for the Ethanol acres. 30 million acres for a small fraction of fuel. Instead use the same acres for solar panels.

Annual Electricity Generated is 26,300 TWh/year.

Over 6× total U.S. annual electricity consumption (~4,100 TWh/year). This is enough to electrify everything in US.

Solar panels don't feed a nation, giving up fertile land for panels is a bad idea. Put them where you can't grow anything.

The ethanol argument is a dying cause.

Eh. Just stop feeding your crops to cows and you need a lot less space to grow stuff. Also you can put the panels on marginal lands first and save a lot of actual good land for grains and vegetables.

You consume ethanol as food? Ethanol is supposed to go into gas cars, via the fossil fuel supply chain.

It’s not an either / or… animals such as sheep can coexist with solar panels and yields go up

Cattle love solar panels - I’ve seen fields of them in southern Germany, almost all hanging out in the shade while munching grass.

Corn for bioethanol is not feeding the nation, it's exploiting the fertile land to literally burn the output.

The argument about corn is to actually stop the waste of the fertile land for fuel. Solar panels can be installed wherever they're necessary, no one is proposing replacing the corn in situ.

> Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power.

The math the person you're replying to was talking about was solar power vs ethanol. While your 800 m^2 sounds like a lot of land area for enough solar panels to fully charge a large electric truck, it's basically nothing compared to how much land area you'd need to grown enough corn to produce enough ethanol to power a similar truck. It's about 500 times as much land area, a fairly obvious result when you consider you get solar power from the land basically every day and corn once a year. Growing plants for ethanol is dumb.

Of course the benefit of a combustion engine is that you don't need to grow corn to make ethanol for it, at least as long as you can get fossil fuels out of the ground and the enemy doesn't disrupt your supply chain for drilling and refining fuel oil. But that's irrelevant since that wasn't the land-use comparison the parent poster was making.

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