Corn gets a ton of subsidized funding, it sure would be nice if all that funding went to green energy instead.
It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate
Submitted 3 weeks ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to energy@slrpnk.net
Comments
WhatSay@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Aeri@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I mean if you think about it, what is a corn field but a really shitty solar panel?
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
To be fair, cornfields consume resources other than solar energy. Like CO2. However the benefits of consuming CO2 goes away if you’re just gonna burn the corn, which releases CO2 again.
Aeri@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Which is why I said “shitty” solar panel specifically!
xXSirDanglesXx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also the costs of planting corn, protecting it, the emissions from equipment used to harvest, transport, and manufacture, and the amount of water needed to make it all happen, it’s extremely inefficient. Solar panels are just there. It’s not always simple to set them up, and the up front cost might be high, but the long-term benefit far outweighs the cost of corn.
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Solar panels dont produce fuel for thermal engines and are intermittent. In the longer term we want electric vehicles and batterie to absorb intermittence but in the short term it has its uses
evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I dont think we’ll ever be in a place where we don’t want to be producing some combustible fuel. We can electrify a whole lot of things, but it’s hard to beat the energy density of stuff you can burn.
thenextguy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I didn’t know solar panels could laugh.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I’m surprised that the difference is apparently that low considering the efficiency of photosynthesis vs the photovoltaic effect, the fact that not all of the plant gets turned into ethanol, and the efficiency of the combustion process.
Inucune@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
How many solar panels to produce the lifetime output of a 4,000 MW Nuclear power plant? (~45 years)
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
How many 4000MW nuclear power plants have been stood up n the last 10 years? What is their total generating wattage/dollar?
Now do the same math for solar.
BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
Don’t compare nuclear and renewables, compare both to fossil fuels and greenwashing garbage like biomass and bio ethanol.
knightly@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
4,000MW / 400w per panel = 10,000,000 panels, or about 3,444 acres of solar panels. That’s about the size of a small-ish town, and 75x larger than an equivalently rated nuclear plant.
However, the initial and maintenance costs of so many solar panels are far lower than those of nuclear, or at least they were before Orange Monday.
sj_zero 2 weeks ago
Except that that solar farm doesn't produce energy at night, so you'd need batteries to smooth out the power. If you used lead acid batteries because they are highly recyclable, you're looking at 2.4 million tonnes of batteries for a 24 hour backup, and they need to be replaced once every 30 years(however more likely 10 years since such a battery backup would be used in a cycling application), and the 4GW nuclear power plant will put out close to 4GW all the time but the solar farm will only produce 4GW of energy for about an hour a day, so you'd need a 20GW solar plant to produce continuous energy equivalent to a 4GW nuclear plant in conditions like northern Europe or the northern US.
Other battery chemistries can be used, but have trade-offs in recyclability, availability, and materials required -- for the lead acid batteries you need lead, sulphuric acid, and some form of plastic, but for other batteries you need exotic materials which are much more difficult to acquire.
Scale and intermittency screw up all the math and nobody really considers those factors. It's fine for a single household which lives based on what is available at the moment, but industrial scale breaks a lot of things -- like ethanol fuels.
That's where base load generation like hydroelectric or geothermal are highly beneficial, because they work 24/7/365 and don't need to be oversized and don't need massive storage solutions. There is a legitimate criticism that they aren't available everywhere, but the reality is that environment was in has to be local, and so you have to make use of the resources that are available. If there isn't enough generating capacity in a region for a bunch of people, they're probably just shouldn't be that many people there you want to be in equilibrium with nature.
deur@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Nobody is arguing against nuclear, shut the fuck up. Live in the real world where we are needing to slowly make progress on nuclear again because of morons who can’t accept chernobyl isn’t going to happen again.
Cort@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m generally pro nuclear, and potential chornobyl is less worrisome to me than a potential Zaporizhzhia.
Godnroc@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
4GW per hour, 24 hours a day would be 96GWh per day.
One statistic I found said that it takes 2.97 acres to make 1GWh of power over a year. Converting that to GWh per day per acre gives me 0.000922.
Dividing the 96GWh by 0.000922 gives me ~104,121.48 acres or ~402 sq. miles.
grue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
But you can’t pour solar panels into a fuel tank. What liquid biofuels are good for is stuff you can’t electrify, like aviation and shipping.
silence7@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Sure, but the context is that the US dedicates almost half its corn crop to ethanol that’s blended with gasoline. Vehicle electrification + solar panels will free up a huge amount of agricultural land.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Bronzebeard@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
There’s multiple companies working on electric passenger planes, and smaller cargo ships.
JerkyChew@lemmy.one 3 weeks ago
Ha? The tv comedy network?
We’ve got to strengthen our knees!
ohwhatfollyisman@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
to give a visual indication of that comparison:
ha
vs.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
dalekcaan@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Idk man solar might be better but the corn sounds a lot funnier.