- The square km the US uses to grow corn for ethanol is about ~~ 1/3rd the total global area required for solar in this article. Ethanol that is a gigantic waste of resources.
They seem like big numbers until you compare it with the enormity of what we already do.
- Yes, and the corn-based ethanol here is used for "feeding cars" that have combustion engines, i.e. it's already used exactly for energy production. The most recent Technology Connections video[1] quoted some numbers on this. All this land dedicated to disposable energy production could be dedicated to renewable energy production instead.
- Such an unfathomable waste when you put it in the context of “feeding cars”. I really appreciated the way this channel broke down this viewpoint. Made me want to finally get some panels for my balcony.
- Your main point still stands, but aren't both of them renewable? Corn is a renewable resource, thus ethanol derived from it is too. It's just seemingly a much less efficient renewable fuel for powering a car compared to solar.
- You're right. Perhaps clean would better capture the distinction in favor of solar in this context? Both corn and solar convert insolation to usable power with a short time between capture and use. Solar, on the other hand, is net negative when it comes to emissions, while the corn harvest is just burnt with the CO2 escaping back to the atmosphere. (And potentially, the solar panels can just be recycled back to new solar panels when they reach the end of their lifetimes. They're mostly aluminum and glass after all.)
- upwards of 60% of the ethanol used in combustion engines is completely wasted.
- What does "wasted" mean in this context?
- It means that it doesn't generate any mechanical work, it's wasted as heat not captured for any other productive purpose (since waste heat can be useful in some contexts).
It's a measure of efficiency.
- i assume heat since most energy in an ICE engine is wasted to heat (~60% wasted iirc)
- The USA grows something more like 121,000 square kilometres of corn for ethanol.
Or about 30 million acres if you’re in to that sort of thing.
https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
- Add in concepts like agrivoltaics and that land could still be productive as arable farmland while it also produces clean energy.
- Yep. 5% of all US land is dedicated to just growing subsidized corn.
- Most of that land probably isn’t useful for much else, in a productive economic sense.
- Except for solar panels. If the corn is subsidized, then the land is not economically productive right now.
- Realistically, can we expect anyone to want to build out solar without subsidies?
- Lots of people do today. Solar is profitable without subsidies.
- A long article, about rising prices driven by fossil fuel costs but also a lot of positivity as you read towards the end and a sudden sharp downturn that’s coming to Australias power prices. Australia’s wholesale power prices halved in q4 2025 due to massive solar and battery investment that on a per capita basis dwarfs china. Australia is now over 50% renewables. It’s set to accelerate too.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...
So at least one continent in this picture is making great progress to achieving this.
- The EU had wind + solar overtake fossil fuels last year too.
Fossil fuels are now less than 30% of electricity generation.
Alas, there's a ton more burning which is not electricity, but progress is undeniable
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
- > wholesale power prices halved
Who cares?
No one pays the wholesale price.
What price does the retail customer pay?
- Retail prices obscure the underlying economics via taxes and subsidies.
Here the wholesale prices are far more relevant economically.
- Indeed.
Still, what good is free energy to anyone if the retail price has only one trajectory.
If politics is a significant cost factor, no amount of technology is going to fix that.
Or, as Jimmy Carr put it: But you go, yeah, you can have net zero, as long as you don't give a fuck about poor people, right? If you don't give a fuck about poor people, of course we can do net zero. - https://youtu.be/H3FwqPkPSHE
- Poor people are hit hardest by the effects of climate change.
- Empathy isn’t universal.
I care less about poor people in poor countries in far away lands, and far away times, than I do my fellow citizens in my relatively wealthy country.
And my fellow citizens, especially the low income folk, are affected everyday by high energy costs. High energy costs result in higher costs of everything.
Whereas the effects of climate change, to the extent that they’re distinguishable from extreme weather events at all, are largely tolerated by even the poorest here in Australia.
High energy costs makes extreme weather events less tolerable.
- It is good then that renewable energy is cheap. There are a million things countries can do to help poor people. Burning fossil fuels is very far down the list.
- > that renewable energy is cheap
Where is this the case?
There is what? Approximately nowhere with high renewables penetration and cheap retail energy prices.
Australia has so much coal and gas we could have electricity plans similar to data plans: all you can reasonably consume for $80 a month, and it would still make approximately zero difference to global anthropogenic carbon emissions.
We’re plenty happy for everyone else to burn our LNG and coal. Our LNG is cheap the Japanese even resell it a profit.[1]
Instead, we have high renewables penetration and electricity prices that have increased at a rate three times higher than general inflation.
1. https://ieefa.org/resources/how-japan-cashes-resales-austral...
- You’re replying in a thread about energy prices dropping because of renewable energy.
- The more power you consume the closer to wholesale is your price. I’m sure Aluminium smelters or fertilizer plants care a lot about wholesale prices.
- No residential retail customer in my country qualifies for any high-usage discount, as far as I’m aware.
Only big industrial users do, and even the largest industrial users I’ve worked for, or adjacent to, in my state don’t come close to amount of electricity used by the aluminium smelter.
- Green isn't supposed to save people money. It's just a shift from bit oil to big green if you're interested in the money part.
- I felt this was telling:
> The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farms we would be almost 10% of the way there.
To me, it's one of many ways in which markets fail to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.
- Markets allocate resources based on supply and demand. Individuals don’t demand solutions to diffuse problems. It’s tragedy of the commons every time.
- > Individuals don’t demand solutions to diffuse problems
Markets solve diffuse problems really well, people signal how much their section of the problem is worth solving and the market judges whether the overall problem can be solved cost effectively. Getting food to everyone is a diffuse problem for example.
Tragedy of the commons is different. Markets don't solve how to solve owning things in common and the usual market recommendation is not to do that.
- I think you have misunderstood the term "tragedy of the commons", which is a phenomenon distinct from a market failure. Also, "markets allocate resources based on supply and demand" is, I believe an oversimplification one should not carry beyond Economics 101. If that were sufficient to explain the totality of market behavior, especially at large scale, then the remainder of the discipline of economics need not exist.
- How much money does a golf course bring in yearly? How onerous are the regulations?
How much money would a solar farm bring in yearly? How onerous would the regulations be?
- Also what is the capitol cost to stand up a golf course vs. a solar farm of equal size? I would imagine solar requires locking up a much larger investment.
- Nice expression, but the book by the same name is fatally flawed in its science.
- There is no magic hand, only a Tragedy of the Commons and greedy individuals doing whatever. (Federally, there is at present time little-to-no prosecution of fraudsters or tax cheats. Economically, it's basically The Purge.)
Appropriate regulations and enforcement is what is missing but ⅔ of country is brainwashed by billionaires and Fox News that "gubberment bad" and "regulations are communism".
- There’s an updated article as of Aug 2021 too: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565
- It seems that a project like this would require more cooperation -
https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-one...
But cooperation only occurs when the entire group is at risk, that isn’t the case currently.
- The biggest impediment to clean energy, which is actually cheaper than fossil fuels, is politics. We have political interference at the highest level to impede solar, storage, and wind.
In the US, residential solar is 5x-6x more expensive than in Australia per W, i.e. on identical system costs, not on what's generated. And they pay their labor better than we do in the US at the same time. It's because of a lot of regulatory and utility interference, and a laundry list of other things:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-real-story-with-australian
This is the headline from a non-partisan energy media outlet when it comes to wind: " How Trump dismantled a promising energy industry — and what America lost---The demolition of the offshore wind sector in 2025 will reverberate for decades, resulting in lost jobs, higher utility bills, and less reliable power grids."
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/offshore-wind/how-trump...
And when it comes to batteries, people that don't care about the effects of mining or oil extraction or toxicity of gasoline all of a sudden start to get all worked up about supposedly "toxic" lithium batteries, because they've consumed a ton of propaganda on the matter, and no facts. People also seem to think that we somehow burn lithium, instead of mine it once, and use a tiny amount (dozens of pounds) to power an entire car, which can then be recycled.
And I can't tell you how many times I've been told that we can't do solar because it takes "too much land" or "physics" by people that pretend to be good with numbers but have never figured out how to calculate the actual requirementns by solar...
This is a US-specific comment, but the rest of the world is not as foolish and is plowing full-steam ahead to a world of ever decreasing energy costs because they are not stopping the progress of better technology.
- In Australia we have so much solar that wholesale electricity prices are often negative during the day. Despite that we still have high retail prices. Domestic battery installations are getting popular and will help.
See: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...
- Nitpick: if you’re trying to illustrate sizes of things, you should use an equal-area map projection.
The Southern Ocean wind installation is to the right scale or not?
- The key point: we can power everything with less than half the land than we have build on or paved over.
- I’ll just leave this here for those who have some time to watch: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=MBVdiOpSdgmGaar5
- As a domestic p.v. auto-builder: the real point is seasonal storage, until we will (if we will) be able to store energy across a whole year not just day-to-day, we simply can't run on p.v. while p.v. is excellent for self consumption if only we stopped trying to create large-scale solutions instead of solutions for domestic and small sheds self-consumption, which are the only technically viable options, given that large injection power plants are nothing but a problem for the grid...
Having cars integrated with the home (since they are 400V LFP on average, just like domestic storage and CSS is already there) is what works well to reduce summer demand peaks, not by passively injecting power but by helping the grid only when it actually needs it.
The only reason it isn't being done is because the political agenda is to strip the majority of private property, and for this reason, the "new deal" that works technically doesn't work in reality. They are trying to make it work for dense cities and large buildings, some not possible on scale for an unsustainable way of life as well. When the FAKE green supporters finally realize this, they will understand how many decades of evolution we are losing just to play into the hands of a few kleptocrats.
- what’s the current, cumulative size of all housing, private home, apartments building roof surface ?
- Too bad most people don't live close to those specific areas.
- The future is solar. This has been clear for years. Solar simply has too many advantages. Plummetting prices, no moving parts, the only form of direct power generation, it can be done anywhere including otherwise unusable land and flexible installation, everything from a window sill to a giant solar farm in the desert.
And of course China is leading this transformation by miles. They're also discovering a whole bunch of secondary benefits too. For example, you need water to clean the solar panels. In desert areas that combination of shade and water has halted or even rolled back desertification. And in places they're feeding livestock on these plants to control their growth.
Orbital data centers make no sense but you know what does make sense? Orbital solar power collectors. I've seen estimates that because of the essentially 24 hour sunlight, no weather and no atmosphere an orbital solar panel can generate around ~7 times the power of a terrestial panel, even factoring in transmission loss from beaming power to the ground. We will reach a point where launch costs are sufficiently low that this will make economic sense.
- Many of the resources consumed to make electricity at the scale we are talking replacing the production of those resources create the other resources used to for various other things
e.g. diesel(heating oil), jet fuel, gasoline, plastics, asphalt, etc
There is a balance of these.
This also doesn't take into account the extra electricity needed to replace the alternative heating methods in the home that utilize these other materials we're abandoning
37 points by robtherobber 5 days ago | 53 comments