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Gas imports or solar panels?
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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Climate
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1GW of panels would take 2,000+ acres of land too.
Well then it's a good thing that there's a lot more than 2000 acres currently being used to grow varieties of corn that aren't even intended for human consumption but will just be turned into ethanol
Plant photosynthesis isn't exactly efficient at all: 6% (It's even lower than this maximum!) The industrial-scale corn-to-ethanol is something of a insanity, since agriculture is intensively polluting/destructive and ridiculously water hungry.
Using the same land area and producing hydrogen with solar, and then converting the H2 to hydrocarbons in a industrial complex would probably be way better. (I would like to know some numbers for this...)
Also, some plants actually like growing in shade. So, the solar-panel-fields don't exclude using the land also for growing food simultaneously, if the panel arrays are raised from the ground level and placed a bit more sparsely.
That was kinda the point I was making, needing a ton of land for solar panels to enable a transition away from oil wouldn't be such a bad thing since so much land is used to grow corn for ethanol which...wouldn't really have much demand following such an energy transition
It's apparently weird if somebody agrees with you on the internet?
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
This video has been posted so many times in this thread that I've inadvertently memorized the video ID.
And? The land doesnt become a useless wasteland. Shading the land actually promotes more plant growth with less water useage.
Think the point is that it represents an added cost not modeled in the infographic. It's really the curse of incremental infrastructure cost, the LNG infrastructure sunk costs would be untenable but they've already been spent. So now solar, however unfairly, has that added infrastructure cost to consider.
The weird thing are solar nimbys. A while back I was reading about a big bunch of solar intended for the Mojave. Perfect, useless wasteland that should be a slam dunk for solar. But NIMBYs said that they would be an eyesore and hurt Vegas tourism. So they proposed installing on Mesas, out of sight. Then they still complained that skydivers could see it.
it's not actually a lot of areas. this is the psychological effect of big numbers. you hear "one million acres" and think it's a big number, like when government spends "one billion dollars on school programmes", and it sounds like a lot, and your brain goes like "oh wow, i could never afford a billion dollars", but actually, if you divide that by 300 million people (population of the US), it's $3 per person ...
same as with land. it's like 20 m² per person on solar panels, probably less than some people's garage.
Land? Or residential and business rooftops, parking structures, roadways, etc... lots of solar access points being wasted. Added benefits in less transmission waste and decentralized, more secure production.
Millions of acres are used to grow corn to make ethanol fuel blend. Hundreds of thousands of tractors and farm implements used to harvest it 1 time a year. Millions of gallons of diesel to run that equipment.
Oil company propaganda strikes again. You are misinformed. Dont spread your idiocy.
Not a major problem, and a reversible one at that, unlike fossil emissions.