07/14/2024
This description of why putting solar on farmland makes so much sense. It’s an untapped goldmine of energy.
Forty Acres and a Sense of Hope - by Bill McKibben
… let’s do the math another way. Like a high percentage of the customers of the Boone County Family Restaurant, Carson drives an F-150 Ford pickup, which has been the most popular vehicle in America for the last 47 years. But Carson drives the new Lightning version, which is an EV. About a third of the corn grown in Illinois—which has some of the very best soils on our home planet—is turned into ethanol, i.e. gasoline. “If you grow an acre of corn, it will produce 900 gallons of ethanol, which will get you about 25,000 miles for a Ford F-150 pickup,” says Carson. “Which is, not bad I guess. But let’s say we put solar on that same acre. It will produce enough electricity every year to drive my Lightning 550,000 miles.”
Another way of saying this is, a photovoltaic panel is almost astonishingly efficient—20 times more efficient than the solar collector we call a corn plant. If that wasn’t true, then we’d be in even deeper trouble on an overheating world. But it is true, which makes it our best single hope for dealing with the climate crisis. Not because you need an F-150—unless you’re a farmer, or an over-avid consumer of biscuits with gravy you probably don’t—but because that small patch of land can provide huge amounts of the energy we all use, without doing anything to raise the temperature. It’s farming the sun and producing a vast stream of electrons.
