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by asdff
73 days ago
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The difference is we already grow corn at scale beyond market need. Probably less has to be paid in that effort than starting up some other industry. Which still can be done along side the corn shouldering the load until that industry reaches the scale of the corn industry's waste product. |
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No, that's the entire point. As mentioned above, for ethanol you input the equivalent of 300 ethanol gallons worth of energy (which could also be ethanol) to get 100 net gallons out you can do whatever you want with. If you instead used that 300 gallons worth of input to produce solar panels, they'd produce 3,600 net gallons worth of equivalent energy over their lifetime. You get 36x more net energy building solar panels than growing corn for ethanol. Sure, you could spend 600 gallons worth of energy and do both, but then you'd still be better off switching the entire 600 gallons of input to solar panels until you run out of solar panel generation capacity or demand. That's the opportunity cost.
Also a minor point worth making is that ethanol is in no way a "waste product" from the corn growing industry that would otherwise go to, well, waste. Farmers aren't just growing a bunch of extra corn for no reason that we can conveniently use for ethanol. If demand for ethanol stopped, they'd stop growing all that extra corn.