There is a company called Solar Foods which is exploring exactly that: they use solar power to produce hydrogen, feed that hydrogen and CO2 to Xanthobacter bacteria, and harvest the produced protein.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016777992...
It would be cool if we spent more time understanding our soils and all of the things living in them more instead of finding ways to require more artificial energy to sustain our civilization.
Putting solar panels into these places disturbs the natural soils. Transporting that energy requires infrastructure that also messes with habitats. Using it on-site requires different infrastructure and activity that is also disruptive.
Just because the land is "virgin" or "barren" doesn't mean nothing is there biologically. Part of biodiversity is biodiversity in the soil itself. Much of that diversity hasn't been officially studied/documented. ie: We don't even know what we are killing off.
Solar panels do have an ecological cost. Expanding to cover the entire planet is the wrong approach (IMO.) We have plenty of urban space and existing infrastructure that we can cover with solar without disturbing farm land or what's left of natural habitats.
Beyond all of this, TFA was comparing corn vs solar. That implies we are talking about farmable land.
And remember the context: were talking of replacing corn grown for energy, monoculture with no insect or plant life, with the same land covered with solar panels, time for soil to recover, native plants to germinate and grow.
Putting solar panels instead of the industrial corn production is partially rewilding it - there are projects in the hotter countries where increased humidity and decreased sunlight actually allows for the more plants to thrive. There are projects using goats to trim the greens under the panels. Etc, etc.
Almost anything is better for the soil, biodiversity and life than industrial corn production.
Pesticides are causing a decline in insect populations and the animals that eat them. Herbicides what can say more than that. Fertilizer causes algae blooms and hypoxic conditions in lakes and streams. All three cause ground water pollution.
I'm a broken record, solar is 30 times more productive per acre than ethanol corn.
Obviously it won't work for everything but appears to be workable enough to do more of it.
That said, I absolutely agree that soil science and husbandry is dearly need to avoid depleting arable land. Farmers are catching on to this and with more support could hopefully make doing this a no brainer based on economics alone.
Farm land is heavily disturbed. All the fertilizer and other chemicals used, soil destroyed by all the things we do to it, and downstream disruption due to fertilizer runoff, animals that are fed and then we have to manage the manure, water that is depleted etc. Placing solar panels on farm land is actually very close to returning it to the nature (of course depending on how exactly you do it, how tightly placed they are, how high etc., but it's also possible to still grow trees under them like some pilot projects in southern Italy or to place them over animal pastures).
If current trends old, it will turn into data centers.
Turns out we (somewhat) can. See for example https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aai8878:
“Crop plants protect themselves from excess sunlight by dissipating some light energy as heat, readjusting their systems when shadier conditions prevail. But the photosynthetic systems do not adapt to fluctuating light conditions as rapidly as a cloud passes overhead, resulting in suboptimal photosynthetic efficiency. Kromdijk et al. sped up the adaptation process by accelerating interconversion of violaxanthin and zeaxanthin in the xanthophyll cycle and by increasing amounts of a photosystem II subunit. Tobacco plants tested with this system showed about 15% greater plant biomass production in natural field conditions.”
It isn’t certain that we can make this work at scale, though. See https://gmopromises.org/article/enhancing-photosynthesis-wit...
Using less than needed for fertilizer for farming though seems unlikely, coal butter was born from desperation for immediate calorie source, not because it was cheaper or more efficient.
Solar panel captures energy from an 800nm wide range (300-1100nm)
Plant captures energy from a 300nm wide range (400-700nm)
The solar panel could reproject and amplify the 300nm range at (800/300=) 2.7X more power than the sunI’m curious what is physically possible, if we assume we can achieve the max possible efficiency. I’m guessing there’s behavior like a Carnot engine, and the energy transfer can only be up to ~86% efficient (but please correct me if I’m wrong!!). In that case, conversion from light to energy via solar panels -> conversation back to light via leds should be 0.86*0.86 = 73% efficient in best case. And the full effect should be (800/300)*0.73 = 1.94, about twice as good as growing plants with the sun’s direct light. I’m surprised that seems possible!
p.s. My efficiency guesses are probably wrong. Please correct me.
And as you say the LEDs aren't 100% efficient either, though both deep red and bright blue are among the most efficient, about 85% there.
So that leaves you with about 50% overall just from those two.
So that would imply they are inherently more efficient just looking at the figures provided.
Conventional agriculture works much better. You can build acres of greenhouses and make a profit.
Vertical farming is such an abject failure that every single vertical farm is biomass constrained, meaning that they have to stretch their biomass with water. This is why vertical farms generally only sell "leafy greens", a marketing term that tries to sweep the inherent technical failure of vertical farming under the rug.
When we've got actually braindead policy like ethanol fuel mandates, the ROI of switching a corn farm to solar is so incredibly high that solutions like this just aren't competitive.
I wish some of our billionaire class would turn their attention to these things rather than building yet another rocket company. Maybe that's why Gates is buying up farmland, who knows.
From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.
If that is the case, then just the electrical energy harvested from solar panels in the UK could convert air into fuel at a faster rate than the WHOLE earth (on average over geological time scales) (as long as the fuel conversion/production was at least 1% efficient at converting electricity to fuel).
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1owp09/if_oil_t...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209624951...
From what we know it's a very lumpy distribution. Most of the fossil fuels were created in a few specific points of history
estimated total fossil fuel in the earth 1.90E+16 tons (all the hydrocarbons, not just easily extracted)
say it got there over a billion years that would be approx 2E7 tons/yr or 1E8 barrels.
ie. 100,000,000 barrels equivalent a year.
Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen?
At any rate, this is why I would like to see a better investigation of the subject
Better Kerogen wiki: https://wiki.aapg.org/Kerogen
No idea if it's correct.
US fracking technology allows otherwise unavailable heavy oil to be harvested but naturally at a higher price than Saudi light crude.
So solar tech, as it declines in cost, will replace a larger and larger portion of fossil fuels but not the entire spectrum of these some come out of the ground close to the form we need them in (solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies).
"Natural gas and oil could last for about 50 years, uranium for around 100 years, and coal reserves, which are the most abundant, roughly 150 years at current consumption levels."
https://www.energyencyclopedia.com/en/physics-mysteries/147-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_rese...
In case of uranium, it's possible to extract it from seawater. This technology was developed and tested, but at current low prices of uranium it's cheaper to mine it.
Out of interest, what common basic error is being made by Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D. from your link, aside from not showing his working or sources?
It's something worth getting on top of.
Here's an alternative link regarding Australia; https://www.ga.gov.au/aecr2025/uranium-and-thorium
couple of extracts:
Australia’s uranium resources are expressed as Economic Demonstrated Resources (EDR), Subeconomic Demonstrated Resources (SDR) and Inferred Resources. Refer to Appendix 3 for definitions of these terms and further information on the National Classification System for reporting of Identified Mineral Resources.
Based on 2023 production rates, Australia’s uranium reserves have an estimated life of 71 years.
I just wanted to signify that there is so much available hydrocarbons and coal underground that humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.
I agree that is very much all that's needed to be said.
I confess to a shuddering dislike of statements of the form "we only have {x} left", a dislike exceeded by my revulsion to statements of the form "we have {X} amount left in the crust or ocean - we can just use that".
Call it a side effect of a couple of decades of geophysical exploration work across the globe :/
Arguably asphalt is exactly the sort of application we should be using petroleum for - keeping it sequestered in earth instead of burning it.
eg: You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up .. and inevitably increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
There are alternatives to virgin bitumen for binding asphalt, like recycled asphalt [1], asphalt blended with recycled rubber, etc. These could conceivably be used together with a smaller amount of virgin petroleum-derived bitumen.
1. https://www.nyc.gov/site/ddc/resources/features/july-2016-gr...
The figure that has to watched, reduced, and ideally if possible made negative for a time is the rate of CO2 addition to the atmosphere; pulling up additional hydrocarbons already sequestered will always(?) lead to some amount of additional CO2 being set free as a gas.
The very existence of any bitumen (derived from buried hydrocarbons) is just a sign of the horse (previously sequestered CO2) having already left the stable (buried for millenia).
Edit: GPT says hydrocarbons yes, oil as in Earth no (because that comes from complex living matter).
Edit 2: As far as we know, I really hope there's more life out there.
> According to Cassini data, scientists announced on February 13, 2008, that Titan hosts within its polar lakes "hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth." The desert sand dunes along the equator, while devoid of open liquid, nonetheless hold more organics than all of Earth's coal reserves.
Went on a bit of a rabbit hole and it appears that there is a lot of methane in the atmosphere and that gets broken down via photolysis into hydrocarbons somehow, and the methane likely is there from the formation of the moon originally via methane ice.
See Figure 2 [1]. Protons, electrons and water ions from space dissociate, in the presence of sunlight, nitrogen and methane. Those combine into intermediate-mass hydrocarbons that produce complex organics. The part we don't understand is how those complex organics, e.g. benzene and naphthalene, turn into large organic particles.
Titan's atmosphere "is a largely anoxic environment, with little oxygen to cause the termination of complex organic reactions" [1].
So there is nothing surprising in finding oil elsewhere than where it has formed.
Some hydrocarbons can form in the absence of life, e.g. by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from syngas, catalyzed by some minerals, where syngas can form in volcanic gases or in hydrothermal vents. However that is likely to have been a negligible contribution to the oil reserves of the Earth and most or all oil ever found has a chemical composition that has clear indications of being produced by the decay of organic matter from living beings.
So I would say yes.
On average though, I would say no.
Solar panels don't convert air to fuel directly, but you could use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
If it helps you, think of it like money. You cannot eat it or be sheltered beneath it, but you can use it to purchase food and shelter.
The real question isn't about using biofuels in place of electric power, it's most important in place of other fuels in applications where electrification isn't possible, like air travel.
Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes. If jet fuel derived from sugarcane or switchgrass becomes cost effective, airplanes can be solar powered for cheap.
> Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes
While airplanes are slightly more efficient than cars at transporting passengers on a distance/energy basis (and only if you exclude electric cars), trains are still much more efficient by about 30%. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...
With respect to carrying freight, cargo ships are the most efficient of all.
Water is extremely viscous, so it creates a lot of drag, and cargo ships must scale to huge sizes and stay under 20 knots to have high efficiency. Trains are only flowing through air, which is much thinner than water, so freight trains and most passenger rail go double or triple that speed. High-speed rail doubles to triples the speed again, but is much, much less efficient than rail traveling at freight speeds, because it has no means of avoiding the added drag.
If you were to try and increase high-speed rail by another two to three times, you'd need a rarefied tunnel to make it approach being practical, which is basically what Hyperloop proposed. It's much more practical to use the already existing rarefied atmosphere at high altitudes, which is why airplanes have unmatched efficiency for travel at those speeds.
When travel time going into days or even weeks doesn't matter, e.g. for cargo, all that matters to efficiency is how slow you can go. When time is taken into consideration, as speeds go up rail becomes more efficient than boats, but they top out and airplanes are more efficient than rail. Eventually sub-orbital rockets become more efficient than airplanes, but there isn't a lot of travel needed at those speeds.
Hyperloop of course was always a non-starter because the kind of energy that would be required to pump down such a huge volume would be ludicrous, maintaining the low pressure extremely difficult, and the amount of materials needed for the tube would be ridiculously large.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
It’s just not sweet corn like you’d eat with corn on the cob.
They'd insist that they'd die without enough protein, and vegetable protein sources don't count. Even limiting their meat to a half-pound per day would cause riots, even though that is more than enough protein.
So efficiency just isn't on the table here. We're going to over-support our meat industry.
What you CAN do quicker is change what you use that capacity for.
And even what you do with the current product right this moment even before you have time to change what you will harvest next year. Corn that that is normally only fed to animals is still absolutely a ready resource for people if they need it. Most of our food is fully artificially constructed out of base ingredients these days. Every box and bag and can on the shelves that needs a carbohydrate barely cares at all where it comes from or what it originally tastes like raw.
Which would be better for the nation's security? Having all this ethanol, or having 31x the energy provided by that ethanol via solar production? We couldn't actually use that much solar power right now, but that's part of the opportunity cost: we aren't gearing up to make use of it because we're generating all of this ethanol that we don't need instead! The capacity maintenance argument works both ways: pay to maintain the capacity to grow vastly more corn than we'll ever need, or pay to maintain the capacity to generate tons more energy that we're far more likely to need.
(Also, taking land that has been largely destroyed by industrial corn farming and changing it into land that's growing some more valuable food crop isn't just a matter of changing your mind about what to grow the next year.)
America already grows enough animal fodder without counting corn for ethanol. If some calamity strikes corn production for animal fodder, it will equally affect corn production for ethanol. Because it's the same crop.
And also why can't you scale farm production up and down? It isn't like manufacturing and factories. Preserve farmland and produce enough for the country's consumption needs. That'll keep farm labor and machinery sufficiently busy. It also prevents the waste of fertile soil growing food that's never eaten.
So the corn farmers are sacrosanct. We can make various mumblings about energy independence and surplus food capacity, but we all know that the real reason it remains is that anybody who proposes doing otherwise would get massacred. (Not just individually. Their entire party would take the blame.)
But you're right. It's entirely political. It's not clear why it needs to be. Can farmers really swing that many elections?
Why not pay them to fallow land instead? I remember Catch-22 had a passage describing it, but I have no idea if that's true IRL. It preserves farming skills, labor, and farmland, and gives farmers free money. Political slam-dunk and a boon for food security.
https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/12/...
I think that's why we don't just do more of that: it's kind of embarrassing. Farmers don't want to hear just how little they actually matter.
That still doesn't explain why we're so busily kowtowing to farmers. I suspect a fair bit of it is inertia: it's the accepted wisdom that insulting farmers is bad (and telling them that they don't actually need their subsidies is an insult). There may well be a day when some political candidate goes to Iowa and says, "Eff you and your stupid caucus. I'm going to spend my time in New Hampshire, and tell them how I'm going to cancel corn subsidies and use the savings for maple syrup subsidies".
wondering if there is a strong evidence for this?.. What is more efficient?
this statement is very disputable. What alternatives are available in your opinion?
I don’t mean to sound glib but that’s all there is to it.
The juice from animal husbandry just isn’t worth the squeeze if you look at the cascading consequences of environmental and health consequences of a meat heavy diet.
I eat meat. A lot of meat. Far too much, but I acknowledge that it isn’t good and that I need to change.
my research and lots of experiments on myself say that there are positive consequences, and there is no much negative consequences if focus on lean unprocessed meat.
As for "cascading consequences of environmental", I also think there is a way to grow meat with reduced consequences.
It could be ground into cornmeal or corn flour and consumed by humans in the event of a global food supply chain collapse. I’d rather eat cornmeal than starve or have to invade Canada to get wheat or whatever.
Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security.
A few billions a year to destroy farming capacity in the rest of the world, and even within our country for growing anything non-corn (because it has to compete with subsidized ethanol production). You could get more benefit and do less harm by using those billions to maintain production capacity for other crops (even if you're not even growing anything but a cover crop!), plus generate far more energy from solar production.
I'd say it's pretty expensive for food insecurity plus opportunity cost.
> Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
That's just false. The mandate (The Renewable Fuel Standard) forces ethanol production. The law says you have to overproduce. If we wanted to preserve capacity, we wouldn't grow the corn, we'd subsidize maintaining the ability to grow it -- and other crops -- which would be way cheaper and also provide more food security.
Needlessly growing corn degrades farmland. That's the opposite of food security.
If we actually wanted to maintain spare production capacity, it would look very different. We'd have to pay to keep land capable of growing food even when not growing any. We'd subsidize the inputs (irrigation, drainage, soil) instead of the outputs. We'd avoid overproduction instead of encouraging it, since it's a form of "inflation" that lowers prices and drives out farmers (other than the ones printing money... er, growing unneeded corn).
We've been losing our importance in the election cycles. We did have a pair of very long tenured senators who definitely gave us an outsized representation for decades, helping to establish many of the ag friendly policies we have in place today (Senators Harkin and Grassley).
I'm not saying I fully agree with the reasoning but I at least kind of get it.
it's not an efficient course if the target is fuel, but that's not the target. it is a decent use if we have lots of corn that nobody wants, which we do.
Plus, IIRC, ethanol is used as a way to make people think it is OK to use fossil fuels allowing the oil industry to point to these farms. Plus I heard too high an ethanol mixture can damage your engine, thus adding to "planned obsolescence".
We know that ethanol isn't really energy efficient. We do it partly because we like having way, way too much food capacity (as a matter of security), and partly because we love to fetishize farmers (especially the ones in Iowa, who get a lot of attention every four years during Presidential campaigns).
Leadership that caters to special interests instead of the overall, long term benefit of citizens and organizations.
Nothing illustrates this better than energy policy and the foibles thereof.
Ethanol is a particularly bad idea that only came about due to the farm lobby.
Solar and renewables are progressing despite policy oppostion.
Cheap energy offers a significant competituve advantage --- that USA policy openly and stupidly rejects.
Why wouldn't land owners want to farm the sun?
The problem is typically their neighbors agitating against allowing the actual land owners to sign leases. It's the rural equivalent of activists who fight apartment complex construction in the name of "preserving neighborhood character."
Fantastic messaging! I could see this being a great way to market this, especially with something mentioned in the article:
> Farm the sun to make 3X more money
operating at median loads, transmission losses over a distance of 1,000 miles generally range between 6% and 15%
IAAEE
It can be moved much easier. Electricity moves at the speed of light (through an ideal conductor).
If you generate electricity in Iowa you can't easily sell it to California.
Within the Eastern and Western grids, power generated anywhere can be easily sold anywhere else within the respective grids. For example, the Intermountain Power Project in Utah has historically supplied a significant portion of electricity to Southern California.
Moving power between these grids is a little more complicated --- only because the grids are not synchronized. But this too is technically possible and could be made easier if there was more demand to do so.
A 15,000 acre solar farm generates 6000GWh a year, which can be moved via a single high voltage pylon.
Of course you don't need to move it to California, as you can power an Iowa data centre, or Chicago, instead.
People may pay more to ship "Florida Oranges" or "California wine" across the country. They won't with electric, they'll just buy locally, and if prices reduce then people will use more (building new data centres is the current vogue, but factories and other industry)
Iowa being a net energy exporter means more economic opportunities for Iowa
People vote, so how does land have political power? Presumably you mean people in low population density get disproportionate representation in USA?
1. https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1378&con...
2. https://casten.house.gov/imo/media/doc/senate_constitutional...
3. https://democracybillofrights.org/how-and-why-to-reform-the-...
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09626...
5. https://casten.house.gov/media/press-releases/casten-introdu...
6. https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI...
7. https://electoral-reform.org.uk/when-it-comes-to-fair-votes-...
If we were to uncap the size of the House of Representatives, and instead change so that each district contains 50k people (or close to it), we would have roughly 7k representatives in the House.
That would effectively eliminate the disproportionate advantage small states have there. (It would not, of course, do anything about the Senate; that would have to be addressed separately.)
Nice and proportional, but a completely unwieldy number of representatives. 700 reps for 500k people each would be more manageable.
(of course, that means very little if (a) they're only from two parties and (b) all 7k districts are gerrymandered six ways from sunday)
This means that California gets 2 senators but so do Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, etc.
Now, the conclusion of the grandparent does not follow in my opinion.
Nothing in the constitution mandates the current state boundaries. California could break itself into multiple states (there is a population minimum) and gain more representation in the senate if it wanted.
But there are trade offs. California is a huge prize in the electoral college and has been a safe Democrat win for quite some time. Splitting into multiple states could jeopardize that. Being large also allows them to lead the way on regulation in a way that smaller states couldn't.
The US government is quite the game theory problem.
The fact that North Dakota has a lot more influence in the US Senate than California on a per capita basis shouldn't be that big of a deal, because the US Senate should be doing a whole heck of a lot less than it is, and states should be picking up that slack.
The more power and responsibility we have given the federal government, the more the issues appear....because it's doing things never intended or envisioned by the founders.
I'd say it's partially that, but it's also priorities.
When the Boomers were coming of age 40 years ago, they didn't want to work in factories like their parents had, and they didn't want to pay the prices necessary to pay American workers to make goods in an environmentally-responsible manner.
So they gladly bought things made in China where - at the time - the average person would rather work in a factory than on a peasant farm, the labor was cheap, and whining about things like "air quality" and "potable water" were either not a high priority, or would get you dealt with by the local Party representatives who had been told that putting that new factory in was the difference between them advancing up the ranks or being sent to a re-education camp.
If anything, China was the ultimate caterer to special interests, those being the Western companies who wanted to do business there without having to deal with hiring Westerners.
When the Boomers were coming of age, there was no trade with China.
Which really was the dumbest geopolitical move in American - and maybe Western - history, but whatever. Too late now.
In any case, he would have been an infinitely better president than people like Bush Junior or Trump. Probably also better than people like Biden, who is not remembered for doing something good, but only for not being so bad as his predecessor and successor.
Well, except for that whole Jeffrey Epstein thing: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/gates-f...
Largely due to, as you point out, special interests.
EDIT: judging by the comments everyone here seems to love China
Based on their public statements and policy actions, absolutely. America these days sounds and behaves like a country being run by absolute cretins.
Readers can assess for themselves the degree to which the U.S. government has done this, as well as the CCP.
By the way Sortition, which is picking random people to run government for a period of time, would probably be better than what we have now in my opinion. We are worse than random.
People/groups engage in politics to exert control over the social environment.
So I’m not talking about “politics” as an emergent social phenomenon I am talking about the deliberate process of setting up a government.
It is possible both to be impressed by China's accomplishments over the past 30 years while remaining critical about its imperfections (and America's as well). It's not about "loving China;" it's about being open-minded, objective, and thorough in considering the matter.
Politics is harder than it looks.
In theory an engineering background should help make better politicians. In practice it isn't the slamdunk you imply.
In practice, China is very different from the USA. For example, China doesn't have open presidential elections.
I have no idea what China or Chinese leaders are like. I have no relation to China.
However, I can say that their policy choices on these technical issues are better than ours. The only emotion I feel when saying this is disappointment in my own country, rather than pride in China. I wish America had more energy production. Almost all American problems are the result of lacking energy production capacity.
Yes, unambiguously. They appear to be aggressively investing in collaborative foreign policy projects globally, have a stellar track record when it comes to not starting random wars around the world, and their economic planning and engagement with decarbonization efforts massively outshine the US.
We still have a lot to answer for.
> exaggerating the scale of things that are still present
What am I exaggerating, exactly?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/14/nx-s1-5734051/measles-outbrea...
> not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes
In some states, yes. In others, the content is being censored (another embarrassment for America, which once censored the teaching of evolution!). See, e.g.:
https://pen.org/educational-censorship/index-of-educational-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_school_curricula...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-whats-behind-the...
2.6M - 5.7M hectares (10,000-22,000 sq miles), less than half of this ethanol land, would power all electricity in the US:
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...
For other comparisons, there are roughly 0.8M hectares of rooftop in the United States (table ES-1 here, 8.13e9 sq m https://docs.nlr.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf).
Looking at LLNL's flowchart of energy in the US:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...
that solar will produce ~13 quads of energy. That's out of a total of only 32.1 quads total of all energy services delivered. When electrifying from fossil fuels to electricity, we only need to (roughly) meet that 32.1 of services; EVs very efficiently deliver electricity to the purpose of movement, ICE are like 20%-30% at best. Burning fossil fuels for heat is ~99% efficient, but heat pumps give you 300%-400% efficiency because they move heat rather than convert electricity directly to heat.
So converting all ethanol land use to solar would power the entire US; that's ignoring all the wind power we generate, all the hydropower we generate, all the next generation geothermal that will probably come online over the next decade. And at the base of it all, storage is super cheap these days!
The transition is possible now, it will be cheaper than fossil fuels, and the longer we let fossil fuel misinformation deceive us, the more we will waste on expensive energy.
It'd be wise to look at all the variables.
How much of co2 can be trapped in the soil and biomatter if we let native plants live underneath the panels?
"The full technical potential of next-generation geothermal systems to generate electricity is second only to solar PV among renewable technologies and sufficient to meet global electricity demand 140-times over."
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-geothermal-energy/...
But agreed, advanced geothermal is likely to have a ton of deployment. It's fun to follow all the startups making great progress right now. The big thing to watch will be the degradation in heat levels over 10-20 years; depletion of heat faster than the ability of the surround rock to conduct it is the biggest threat to the technology as a whole right now. But early pilots are showing no fall in output temperature so far, so that's great.
Well more precisely, the inputs for making the solar panels compared to the inputs for making geothermal plants. The best of solar last 30 years atm and the best of geothermal atm last 100+ years. Not to mention you don't need any rare imported minerals to make geothermal plants.
