12.7M acres of solar is is about 82% of the solar required to decarbonize the US in the Net Zero America E+ scenario (there's wind and existing nuclear and stuff in there too, but that's the solar portion).

Or we can have 5% of our gasoline displaced.

March 26, 2026 - 01:04 UTC

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Increasing the demand for corn, just as fertilizer becomes unavailable and/or very expensive, seems . . . problematic.
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Planting corn to make ethanol to burn in gas-guzzling vehicles seems like peak stupidity.
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Back when GWB instituted the first ethanol mandate I would expound upon how foolish it was to anyone who'd listen. Sadly it didn't work. It seems like the only way out of the ethanol ridiculousness is to switch to EVs. Wish more people had voted D in '24 so we'd still have the IRA to help with that.
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Turns out growing corn is not the most efficient way to convert sunlight into useful energy
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So much if this.
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Sooooo, 16.3% of New Mexico?

(Wolframalpha tells me that New Mexico is 77.82 million acres big.)

I’m not say it should all be put in New Mexico, I’m just saying it wouldn't even cover 1/4 the size of a state it would make a lot of sense to put all the panels in.
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You can't concentrate the panels that much because the grid can't distribute power from there to the whole US.

But you can totally cover every parking lot and irrigation canal in the US with solar to start.
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Wait, that's it?

That seems-

Very doable, actually.

How much for full decarbonization?
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If 12.7m is 82%, some back of the envelope math says about another 3m acres, or another 8th of Indiana.
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Its about 15M acres of solar, 1 West Virginia.

Plus another several million for wind (multiple millions if you include the spacing).
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Part of the reason they want to push corn biofuel is because of the trade war. Farmers can't sell their corn and instead of switching crops they will pressure the gov to subsidize biofuel so they can have a market
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Difference being that you can’t plant corn on top of people’s houses?
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that's a tiny fraction of the land we've dedicated to parking lots and lawns, btw
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Neat thing is you can use parking lots for this and people would enjoy their cars being in shade
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also animal farms (mentioning those since those are often not suitable for plant farming as much)
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It's significantly more than all the parking spots in the country.
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Yes, but agribusiness needs to get richer!
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solar panels reflect, corn stalks consume

thus the Public Gender demands supremacy of the corn
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bsky.app/profile/johnsmillie42.bsky.social/post/3mhtsazy2uk2w

In conclusion, I am quite mad at my county government
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Or you could change the law to allow the ethanol to be made from excess sugar cane . . . but that would mean Mexico could make a lot of money, and we can't have that.
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The solar industry needs to start baking the cost of politicians into their business model. If the whole US solar industry dedicate ~2% of annual revenue to bribery, the stupid problems would go away. And I'm not sure it's possible to operate in the US without it any more.
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Our engines are doomed!!! Get that corn out of here.
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Or, and hear me out, use that 12.7M acres for solar AND grow a shade tolerant ethanol source (eg Sugar Beet or Switchgrass) underneath and double up
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but CORN! 🌽

Won’t someone think of the corn! 🌽

😭
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If we’re growing sugar, than using it as sugar or srinkable alcohol like run seems much better than turning it into industrial alcohol.
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Plus you don't even need arable land for solar. Hell, most of Nevada is empty desert anyway.
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Life long Nevada resident & while we have huge swaths of open land the portions that are “empty” are pretty much only the dry lake beds, UNTIL IT RAINS, then they ecologically shifts drastically for dozens and dozens of rare and unique species.

Better to just cover like half of Kansas and Nebraska.
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If only the country had some big empty sunny deserts that can't be used for anything else.
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Agrivoltaics doesn't even mean that the two are exclusive. You can have both.
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Makes a hellava lot more sense. But Republicans have been poo pooing solar since Reagan removed the panels from the WH 40+ years ago.
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STUPID STUPID STUPID
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me the humble farmer making $400k annual income off of government subsidies: city people are unproductive leeches living off of welfare
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We could also buy the ethanol from Brazil, because sugarcane ethanol is 10 times as efficient to make as corn ethanol while using that the space used to grow corn ethanol for solar power stations + mixed solar and farms (putting shades above plants helps if it's too hot for them).
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hell, even wheat is better than corn for producing ethanol. the only reason corn is used is because it is slightly less wasteful than paying corn farmers to leave their land fallow
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Anything to abate carbon emissions is absolutely critical. So yes we need a stronger nuclear powered backbone as solar/wind will never be stable.

There will be something better in the future to replace nuclear, but for now we need to get rid of these carbon emissions.
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Nah
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And here's the really fun part! There's only so much farmland and farmers out there. The more we prioritize growing corn for fuel, the less we prioritize growing food for food. You know, the thing groceries are made from?
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Neat thing with solar is you can plant shade tolerant crops right under them. So you can have your avocados and toast your bread, too!
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Just think of the huge quantity of diesel fuel required to transport seed, tend to crops with tractors, harvest the corn, transport it to ethanol plants, dry the corn with natural gas and more diesel to haul the ethanol to refineries since ethanol can’t be transported by pipeline. Ethanol sucks.
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I think life cycle analyses of corn ethanol show that its GHG footprint is no different from petroleum’s. So moving to E15 does nothing to fight climate change, it only throws a short-term lifeline to farmers caught in the spiral of corporate control, debt peonage, and overproduction.
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Plus the up-front capital infrastructure costs of developing all those solar farms is the electrical gift that keeps on giving year after year (apart from regular maintenance). Unlike ethanol from corn which has to be regrown every harvest with all the attending inputs.
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Meanwhile stable genius Trump is actively destroying solar farms
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And solar doesn't have to take up land that is being used for another purpose. We already co-locate solar over parking lots, roofs, shade loving crops, canals, etc.

If all parking lots with 10+ spaces had solar panels, we'd generate anywhere between 35 and 95% of annual US power needs.
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In a decarbonized future, the 15M acres of solar would supply a bit under 40% of primary energy.

Every single parking space in the US is 7.5M acres, and it's not all usable. So 10% more likely.
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12.7 M acres is dam huge footprint to basically remove from the biosphere for solar. That's bigger than the state of West Virginia!
What about all the industrial resources that would be consumed with such a project? They all have their own footprint's as well.
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West Virginia is about 15.4M acres and is indeed the land comparison used in the Net Zero report for amount required.

Life cycle emissions of Solar PV are currently 40g/kWh and falling. Gas is about 450 and coal 900. A 91% or 95% reduction isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better.
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Related:

Solar + EV >> ethanol + ICE

bsky.app/profile/williamsforoppd.bsky.social/post/3m2s3dx7hzc2y
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Solution: send all the ICE agents home to drink the ethanol in front of the TV…
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Corn Ethanol is such a waste on so many levels.

Brazil uses sugar cane and is energy independent

Switchgrass would be a better source for Ethanol in the US if at all, and you could still intigrate Switchgrass fields with solar or wind

but Corn. because Bush is stupid
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on it
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A significant amount (all?) of that yield increase needed will be achieved by continuously improving corn genetics, considering that's what's been happening. We have way more bushels now and aren't ripping up new ground for them. Solar should also be moving forward, just lots more siting options.
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Related

bsky.app/profile/doremusjessup.bsky.social/post/3mfmv7vmwsk24
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Alabama, too
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but we don’t want to solve the climate crisis, we want to grow corn!
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How many acres of parking lots does America have?
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bsky.app/profile/johnsmillie42.bsky.social/post/3mhwjd3ik3k23
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Turn Death Valley into one giant solar farm. Pay the people who install it a million bucks each.
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Half of the acreage of Indiana is what proportion of the USA?

Anyway, dirty air supporters should be celebrating Zeldin's announcement today that refiners don't have to add more oxygenate into their gasoline deliveries in another Republican blow to farmers.

But kind of good since N is so costly.
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