Corn gets a ton of subsidized funding, it sure would be nice if all that funding went to green energy instead.
to give a visual indication of that comparison:
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vs.
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Idk man solar might be better but the corn sounds a lot funnier.
I mean if you think about it, what is a corn field but a really shitty solar panel?
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
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.
Oh I think we will get there quicker than people believe and it comes with so much advantage in terms of noise, mechanical complexity, energy efficiency, waste heat, vibrations, ease of danger, maintenance, that I think electrification is now largely a matter of cost and that energy density will be worked around as soon as the rest is affordable.
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.
Which is why I said “shitty” solar panel specifically!
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.
I didn’t know solar panels could laugh.
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.
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How many ha of solar panels to produce the lifetime output of a 4,000 MW Nuclear power plant? (~45 years)
How many 4000MW nuclear power plants have been stood up in the last 10 years? What is their total generating wattage/dollar?
To give you a hand, none have been built in the US in that time. The closest ones are the Vogel powerplants in Georgia, and each of them is just 1200MW. They were also something like 17 billion over budget and 7 years late. Local residents are facing a permanent extra $15/month fee just to pay for building them.
Now look at solar. We stood up a 1400MW Gemini solar plant in Nevada in 2 years from paperwork to inception, at a cost of 2 billion dollars. It includes solar and batteries. It won’t give you 24hr steadystate, but properly built, you could indeed make it run “24/7” at 1000MW by adding about 16hr of battery and 2x-3x the panels. This would still cost less and be built way, way faster than even 1 Vogle nuclear plant.
Commodity solar and battery are here and already beating solar while their tech just gets better. Why would we build antiquated, large nuclear plants at this point at all?
Don’t compare nuclear and renewables, compare both to fossil fuels and greenwashing garbage like biomass and bio ethanol.
Is bio ethanol bad?
From wikipedia:
Figures compiled in a 2007 report by National Geographic[70] point to modest results for corn ethanol produced in the US: one unit of fossil-fuel energy is required to create 1.3 energy units from the resulting ethanol
Add on top of that the environmental impact and opportunity cost of the land use, and corn based ethanol becomes a non-viable solution.
The thing with biofuels is that they could be used to feed people instead
It’s bad because it uses tons of space and resources that could be used for other things. It also promotes mono culture and it usually uses fertilizers and pesticides that are not necessarily allowed on other crops, as they won’t be used as feed.
So, it’s bad for biodiversity, bad for land use, bad for resource use. The upside of being a low carbon fuel is completely offset by the impact it has on nature.Yes, really really bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s multiple companies working on electric passenger planes, and smaller cargo ships.
Ha? The tv comedy network?
We’ve got to strengthen our knees!
