Just for the Ethanol acres. 30 million acres for a small fraction of fuel. Instead use the same acres for solar panels.
Annual Electricity Generated is 26,300 TWh/year.
Over 6× total U.S. annual electricity consumption (~4,100 TWh/year). This is enough to electrify everything in US.
Solar panels don't feed a nation, giving up fertile land for panels is a bad idea. Put them where you can't grow anything.
The ethanol argument is a dying cause.
Eh. Just stop feeding your crops to cows and you need a lot less space to grow stuff. Also you can put the panels on marginal lands first and save a lot of actual good land for grains and vegetables.
You consume ethanol as food? Ethanol is supposed to go into gas cars, via the fossil fuel supply chain.
It’s not an either / or… animals such as sheep can coexist with solar panels and yields go up
Cattle love solar panels - I’ve seen fields of them in southern Germany, almost all hanging out in the shade while munching grass.
Corn for bioethanol is not feeding the nation, it's exploiting the fertile land to literally burn the output.
The argument about corn is to actually stop the waste of the fertile land for fuel. Solar panels can be installed wherever they're necessary, no one is proposing replacing the corn in situ.