Emily Johnston: Wow: “If you grow an acre of corn, it will produce 900 gallons of ethanol, which will get you about 25,000 miles for a Ford F-150...which is, not bad I guess. But let’s say we put solar on that same acre. It will produce enough electricity every year to drive my Lightning 550,000 miles.”

Wow: “If you grow an acre of corn, it will produce 900 gallons of ethanol, which will get you about 25,000 miles for a Ford F-150...which is, not bad I guess. But let’s say we put solar on that same acre. It will produce enough electricity every year to drive my Lightning 550,000 miles.”

Forty Acres and a Sense of Hopesubstack.com Sunshine on a Cloudy Week

More relevantly, producing that 900 gallons of ethanol will consume the energy equivalent of around 600-1200 gallons of gasoline. Each time. Whereas that PV array will pay back its embodied energy in 3-4 years and last 30-50 years.

Not enough people realize that ethanol is basically a scam. It would be fine if people were like "oh no, this year we have an excess of corn, what do we do?!" But they are literally growing crops ONLY to render the corn to ethanol. So stupid!

We use 30-40% of the US corn crop, the biggest corn crop of any country, for ethanol each year!

Last Week Tonight (John Oliver) had an episode just a few weeks back that covered the broad brush strokes of this nightmare industry. And Adam Conover (who ruins everything) did an episode of a Netflix doc called The G Word where he talked about subsidies, and how no one wants to nullify them.

It's been an issue for about two decades, maybe longer. My understanding is it was originally designed to prop up corn farmers when they were going under. Initially the energy retrieved was less than the energy put in to produce ethanol, but apparently they get more out these days.

Yes, I was haranguing people in the early 2000s about ethanol's negative energy balance citing David Pimental's work. It has become slightly positive now, but the energy & land savings of solar powered EVs just crushes even the most efficient ethanol production. news.cornell.edu/stories/2005...

Cornell ecologist's study finds that producing ethanol and biodiesel from corn and other crops is not worth the energy | Cornell Chroniclenews.cornell.edu Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of Californ...

Ethanol is (bad) farm policy, not energy policy.

Ethanol from corn and wheat give a relatively poor return in energy out for the energy in. My understanding is that sugar cane gives a well defined increase in energy which is why Brazil uses it. But none of this really makes up for food crops lost to fuel production.

Yeah the thing is that if you look at it big picture you need an energy return ratio of at least 3:1 (and that’s VERY scant) to have it be remotely worthwhile. However much it has improved I doubt they’ve cracked 2:1. And the externalities (eg soil loss) are enormous.

Yeah but ultimately the best form of personal vehicular propulsion is simply ... Electricity. Physically, that is the lowest loss energy production, transport, storage and use system.

Totally agree! Electric buses in particular beat everything except bicycles. Mainly because the battery and motor aren't scaled up in proportion to the number of passengers carried. Less battery per passenger.

And THAT is if you decide it's an either-or situation. It's not! Agrivoltaics means using land for crops AND solar power. www.energy.gov/eere/solar/a...

Agrivoltaics: Solar and Agriculture Co-Locationwww.energy.gov Agrivoltaics, or the practice of solar agriculture co-location, is defined as agricultural production underneath or adjacent to solar panels, such as crops, livestock, and pollinators.

Story I heard is that blueberries, when grown under or near PV panels, will have a lower yield ... the plants are getting less sunshine, and thus, less energy, and thus, cannot produce as much as expected.

Indeed, a farmer should consider the environment, including sunlight, rainfall, and soil conditions when picking what crop to grow. But what kind of farmer *doesn't* do that?

I read that greens grown in AZ desert under PV use half the water and increase yield of both greens and electricity!

That was a peer reviewed journal paper

Now if we could just get them to stop growing alfalfa for Saudi (or any) cows….

We need to change so many water laws to do that. (so we need to get started instead of giving up)

Some crops have higher yields under agrivoltaics and some crops have lower yields. The lower yields are ofset by the revenue from the PV. So the dual use ends up more profitable even with the reduced yield.

As long as the crop produces a profit after considering the cost to plant, tend, and harvest (which might be elevated by the need to work around the PV's) then yes. But possibly not. But farmers tend to be fairly good at these calculations, which are assisted by the experiments currently going on.

Ethanol was always the corn lobby trying to get sweet sweet subsidies, it was never about a greener fuel source

After I read Ultra-Processed People, I'm convinced we could save literally billions of dollars in various expenses, including healthcare, simply by nullifying corn subsidies. You'd basically be knee capping the junk food industry.

We will defeat this threat to the Corn Lord with government subsidy and propaganda 💪💪💪 none will stand against the cob

And the land can often still be used to graze sheep

I'm pretty sure this guy's math is off. There is no way it is only 22x. My numbers are coming up as 65x based on an actual solar field in MI vs prime yields in IA. Eg 215 bushels per acre @ 2.8 gal/bush is only 602 gal. My 65x doesn't include any growing inputs for corn (drying, trans, fert, etc)

Agreed. I get something like 700,000 miles: 5 acres/MW (fairly typical total footprint, from memory) 20% capacity factor (fixed tilt, approximate, from memory) 490 Wh/mile (Lightning Monroney sticker) gives 715,000 miles per year per acre. So, less than you get, but probably too conservative.

bsky.app/profile/jnxo...

Y'all frame "green" energy & tech by capitalist requirements- "we need this much energy- how many fields do we need to cover/how much do we need to drill to install pylons?"- and never stop to think how that shit only benefits our current needs/wants- it doesn't benefit the environment or wildlife.

The article makes a great point that if the alternative is a monocrop corn field - that corn field is going to be drenched in fertilizers and insecticides that seep into the water tables and waterways and otherwise create and ecological dead zone. Or a housing development or data center or warehouse

It's so disappointing that so many of you seem to think the only alternative to industrial ag is more development. Just an astounding lack of imagination and understanding of actual solutions. bsky.app/profile/jnxo...

Lmao- false equivalence- you don't need a field for solar. Better off not growing monoculture, putting the solar over pavement/on rooves, and doing sustainable farming or rewilding on the acreage

I didn't say that - *the farmers in that town did.* Those are the options they're picking from. The article also discusses how there's only so much solar development you can do in such areas given an anemic grid. And that rooftop solar is good! Read articles before declaring them heresy.

I read it, and I said what I said, and you are missing the point. More development is not "green".

An average wind turbine produces 10,116,000 kwH per year. Thats a lot of miles in your Ford F150. www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-man...

How many homes can an average wind turbine power? | U.S. Geological Surveywww.usgs.gov According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average U.S. home uses 893 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per month. Per the U.S. Wind Turbine Database, the mean capacity of wind tur...

You guys need more diverse crops. Not just corn. I mean corn is nice and all but there's other vegetables that would do just as well on that beautiful farmland.

I remember a discussion about the sci-fi book Silo and I believe corn is the highest calorie per sq foot crop there is. (Although thinking about it, its hard to believe it can beat potatoes)

Nah man, it's just because there's a fuck ton of government handouts for corn. Corn is pretty much worthless as a food crop. Eating unprocessed corn, you can't even break it down completely; Natives learned you have to eat it with lime.

Iirc, the highest is sweet potato.

Interesting! Would not have thought of that!

I think it depends on how you measure it. If it is a one shot measurement, i think rice might come out on top. But rice takes a long time to mature, so there is another measurement that acounts for how many days to harvest and that's where sweet potatoes come out on top.

Sweet potatoes are also a tropical/subtropical crop with a 12 month growing season.

Potatoes are also nutritionally complete, so you could survive off of just eating potatoes. I think that’s why Andy Weir used them as the food source in The Martian (I can’t remember if the astronaut was supposed to have vitamins as well, though.)

Plus, you can ...

This guy is being way too generous on the ethanol side of the equation

We need all the farmland we have to produce food. Plenty of room over carparks & roads for solar panels. We also need the political will to state that all new buildings should have solar panels as standard.

(small note, but no, we don't: the vast majority of corn right now is being used to feed cattle, then the junk food industry, then regular industry, and at something like 15% is human edible food) (Also, this country produces a massive surplus of food that we export)

With you until the last sentence…an exported surplus of actual food is a fine thing—good farmland is hard to come by. Also, as others have pointed out, lots of it isn’t EVEN for cattle, but for ethanol.

I've gotten the impression that people sometimes think of food like they think of trash, but in reverse: there's too much / too little, when that's not even close to true. Hell, there's one estimate that we THROW AWAY as much as 1/3 of all food - both pre-sale, and from your plate.

IE, nearly every last person who is starving in the world is starving, not because of there not being enough food, but either because of war, bad infrastructure, or simply evil or insufficient government policies.

There’s a lot of truth in this, but it’s more complicated than that. George Monbiot’s Regenesis is terrific…and my pod with him was super interesting (because of him, not me!): podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a...

‎A Wild and Beautiful World: George Monbiot: Nourishing Ourselves and the Wild on Apple Podcastspodcasts.apple.com ‎Show A Wild and Beautiful World, Ep George Monbiot: Nourishing Ourselves and the Wild - Jan 18, 2024

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