alt Hacker NewsIf farms would choose to do solar instead of crops, I would assume that's because they can get more $/acre, but that could cause food prices to rise. At the same time, energy prices would drop if there was a surplus, so I wonder where it would level out. Lower energy cost could have a small affect in reducing the price of processed foods, but I imagine it would be very small (but I don't really know the energy cost of most processed foods).
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You could only allow the conversion for farms that grow corn for ethanol at first. Isn't that around 10 million hectares on the low estimates?
I sometimes wonder what would happen to our other resources if energy was abundant and "free". For example desalination plants running for free could perhaps be used to refill an aquifer.
Of course there are markets and balances in the real world. The idea that energy is always scarce and that we shouldn't produce more than I as an individual need always feels a bit like maintaining scarcity.
often energy storage has a lot of losses in the the conversion. but if you produce 10x of what you need for "free". Would that really matter? I'm sure we will get there at some point.
There’s also the possibility of famine. But hey at least we’d have AI.
This can be confounded heavily by the riding “agrivoltaics” trend of finding ways to use solar panels while continuing to farm the same land. The most common example are ranching (e.g. letting sheep enjoy the shade under panels) but some crops actually benefit from lower sun intensity.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/feb/22/k...
However, that’s probably unnecessary: just converting the land used to produce ethanol to solar farms would produce an enormous amount of electricity with no impact on food production.
> Through spatial analyses, we determined that converting just 3.2% of land currently used for corn ethanol would increase the share of utility-scale solar energy in the US from 3.9 to 13%.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2501605122