FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
71% Positive
Analyzed from 1886 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#solar#corn#energy#fuel#ethanol#more#food#land#https#power
Discussion (87 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.
If that is the case, then just the electrical energy harvested from solar panels in the UK could convert air into fuel at a faster rate than the WHOLE earth (on average over geological time scales) (as long as the fuel conversion/production was at least 1% efficient at converting electricity to fuel).
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1owp09/if_oil_t...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209624951...
Edit: GPT says hydrocarbons yes, oil as in Earth no (because that comes from complex living matter).
So I would say yes.
On average though, I would say no.
If it helps you, think of it like money. You cannot eat it or be sheltered beneath it, but you can use it to purchase food and shelter.
Solar panels don't convert air to fuel directly, but you could use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
There is a company called Solar Foods which is exploring exactly that: they use solar power to produce hydrogen, feed that hydrogen and CO2 to Xanthobacter bacteria, and harvest the produced protein.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016777992...
We've been losing our importance in the election cycles. We did have a pair of very long tenured senators who definitely gave us an outsized representation for decades, helping to establish many of the ag friendly policies we have in place today (Senators Harkin and Grassley).
I'm not saying I fully agree with the reasoning but I at least kind of get it.
it's not an efficient course if the target is fuel, but that's not the target. it is a decent use if we have lots of corn that nobody wants, which we do.
Plus, IIRC, ethanol is used as a way to make people think it is OK to use fossil fuels allowing the oil industry to point to these farms. Plus I heard too high an ethanol mixture can damage your engine, thus adding to "planned obsolescence".
The real question isn't about using biofuels in place of electric power, it's most important in place of other fuels in applications where electrification isn't possible, like air travel.
Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes. If jet fuel derived from sugarcane or switchgrass becomes cost effective, airplanes can be solar powered for cheap.
We know that ethanol isn't really energy efficient. We do it partly because we like having way, way too much food capacity (as a matter of security), and partly because we love to fetishize farmers (especially the ones in Iowa, who get a lot of attention every four years during Presidential campaigns).
Leadership that caters to special interests instead of the overall, long term benefit of citizens and organizations.
Nothing illustrates this better than energy policy and the foibles thereof.
Ethanol is a particularly bad idea that only came about due to the farm lobby.
Solar and renewables are progressing despite policy oppostion.
Cheap energy offers a significant competituve advantage --- that USA policy openly and stupidly rejects.
Largely due to, as you point out, special interests.
EDIT: judging by the comments everyone here seems to love China
Based on their public statements and policy actions, absolutely. America these days sounds and behaves like a country being run by absolute cretins.
Readers can assess for themselves the degree to which the U.S. government has done this, as well as the CCP.
By the way Sortition, which is picking random people to run government for a period of time, would probably be better than what we have now in my opinion. We are worse than random.
People/groups engage in politics to exert control over the social environment.
Politics is harder than it looks.
In theory an engineering background should help make better politicians. In practice it isn't the slamdunk you imply.
I have no idea what China or Chinese leaders are like. I have no relation to China.
However, I can say that their policy choices on these technical issues are better than ours. The only emotion I feel when saying this is disappointment in my own country, rather than pride in China. I wish America had more energy production. Almost all American problems are the result of lacking energy production capacity.
Yes, unambiguously. They appear to be aggressively investing in collaborative foreign policy projects globally, have a stellar track record when it comes to not starting random wars around the world, and their economic planning and engagement with decarbonization efforts massively outshine the US.
Why wouldn't land owners want to farm the sun?
The problem is typically their neighbors agitating against allowing the actual land owners to sign leases. It's the rural equivalent of activists who fight apartment complex construction in the name of "preserving neighborhood character."
Fantastic messaging! I could see this being a great way to market this, especially with something mentioned in the article:
> Farm the sun to make 3X more money
People vote, so how does land have political power? Presumably you mean people in low population density get disproportionate representation in USA?
This means that California gets 2 senators but so do Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, etc.
Now, the conclusion of the grandparent does not follow in my opinion.
Nothing in the constitution mandates the current state boundaries. California could break itself into multiple states (there is a population minimum) and gain more representation in the senate if it wanted.
But there are trade offs. California is a huge prize in the electoral college and has been a safe Democrat win for quite some time. Splitting into multiple states could jeopardize that. Being large also allows them to lead the way on regulation in a way that smaller states couldn't.
The US government is quite the game theory problem.
2.6M - 5.7M hectares (10,000-22,000 sq miles), less than half of this ethanol land, would power all electricity in the US:
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...
For other comparisons, there are roughly 0.8M hectares of rooftop in the United States (table ES-1 here, 8.13e9 sq m https://docs.nlr.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf).
Looking at LLNL's flowchart of energy in the US:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...
that solar will produce ~13 quads of energy. That's out of a total of only 32.1 quads total of all energy services delivered. When electrifying from fossil fuels to electricity, we only need to (roughly) meet that 32.1 of services; EVs very efficiently deliver electricity to the purpose of movement, ICE are like 20%-30% at best. Burning fossil fuels for heat is ~99% efficient, but heat pumps give you 300%-400% efficiency because they move heat rather than convert electricity directly to heat.
So converting all ethanol land use to solar would power the entire US; that's ignoring all the wind power we generate, all the hydropower we generate, all the next generation geothermal that will probably come online over the next decade. And at the base of it all, storage is super cheap these days!
The transition is possible now, it will be cheaper than fossil fuels, and the longer we let fossil fuel misinformation deceive us, the more we will waste on expensive energy.
"The full technical potential of next-generation geothermal systems to generate electricity is second only to solar PV among renewable technologies and sufficient to meet global electricity demand 140-times over."
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-geothermal-energy/...
But agreed, advanced geothermal is likely to have a ton of deployment. It's fun to follow all the startups making great progress right now. The big thing to watch will be the degradation in heat levels over 10-20 years; depletion of heat faster than the ability of the surround rock to conduct it is the biggest threat to the technology as a whole right now. But early pilots are showing no fall in output temperature so far, so that's great.
Well more precisely, the inputs for making the solar panels compared to the inputs for making geothermal plants. The best of solar last 30 years atm and the best of geothermal atm last 100+ years. Not to mention you don't need any rare imported minerals to make geothermal plants.