Stop Growing Corn to Feed Cars

Several weeks ago, kottke.org linked to a video by a YouTuber whose channel is called Technology Connections. The video is called You are being misled about renewable energy technology. 

I watched about half of it at the time, took some notes, and meant to post about it, but you know... there has been a lot else happening lately. There still is! But today, I saw this jaw-dropping headline in the Star Tribune that finally has me getting off my butt to post:

It's not news to me that ethanol is not a good way to generate energy, and that it's a political football in the Midwest. I knew the amount of energy that goes into making a gallon of ethanol is more than the amount of energy that comes out of it. Which is stupid, and that ethanol should be stopped. 

But until I watched this Technology Connections video, I didn't understand how bad of an energy investment it is.

The TC guy explains in (possibly too much) detail why.

Around minute 33, he describes a specific 120-acre corn field in Illinois, and gives a very conservative analysis of how many miles of driving that one field can fuel with ethanol and E85 vs. solar and electric vehicles:

• 2 million miles from ethanol
• 74 million miles from solar (that's 37,000 megawatt hours in a year)

Then he goes on to say, there are about 96 million acres planted in corn in the U.S. Of that, 25–40% is used for ethanol. If a quarter of that (25 million acres) were converted to solar, it would generate almost 8 billion megawatt hours. (He does the math for this, of course.)

That's 84% more than the total amount the U.S. grid currently carries. 

And this is the money quote (around minute 38):

Even with our mediocre latitudes and weather patterns, all the land we need to generate electricity with solar power alone can be freed up if we just stop growing corn to feed to cars.   

He then goes on to talk about wind, and I haven't even listened to the rest of it, so who knows what else is in there! I have to get back to it.

So seeing this incredibly dumbfounding headline in the newspaper is just too much to take in the midst of all the other outrages we're living with. The answer is right in front of our faces. Just do it.