alt Hacker NewsA fascinating takeaway from that video for me... If you take the US land that is dedicated to growing corn for ethanol that is put in gasoline, and replace all the corn on that land with solar panels, how much energy would it produce? Twice today's total electrical generation in the US, from all sources. And that's in the corn belt, which is far from ideal for solar. It would be billions of panels, but it's a pretty interesting perspective on the questions about the land use requirements of solar.
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Another genuine question: I wonder how that would change the climate in those areas. I live in Iowa and "corn sweat" is a thing that never fails to make several weeks of summer completely unbearable.
Genuine question: How much energy, minerals, transportation, manufacturing, etc, etc. goes into making the panels. How much are the panels going to make back percentage wise in it's lifetime vs. the cost to make and transport, install?
Corn kind of reproduces itself every year (If you don't get the GMO kind), so you only need natural resources to continue to grow it right? Water, sunlight and labor?
It shows that bioenergy is very land inefficient.
There was a book about renewable energy in Britain about 17 years ago, "Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air" that tried to make the argument that renewables could not power Britain, there wasn't enough land. But if you drilled down, this conclusion was due to use of biofuels.