In A Contest Between Solar & Ethanol, There Is One Clear Winner – CleanTechnica

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Solar United Neighbors is a community action group working to bring more clean energy to Indiana. It has heard all that palaver about solar destroying the rural way of life by converting prime farmland to solar farms and it has the stats that prove that is a blivet — which is defined as 10 pounds of horse puckey in a 5-pound pail.

Check this out. The group says, “In 2024, 43% of Indiana’s corn went to ethanol production. But, in terms of land use efficiency, solar beats ethanol in multiple metrics. Most importantly, solar is 20 times more efficient than ethanol, even when accounting for useful byproducts such as animal feed. Harvesting solar energy rather than ethanol leads to less pollution from fertilizer runoff and less erosion from tillage while providing a new drought resistant revenue stream.”

That’s pretty damning stuff. Solar farms are farming. They are converting sunlight into energy just as plants convert sunlight into the energy they need to grow. Solar United Neighbors has more arrows in its quiver. It claims solar is not the primary reason for the loss of farmland.

That’s a topic that should be taken seriously, but the reality is that solar is not the driving force behind it. SUN says, “Between 2013 and 2021, only 5 percent of lost Indiana farmland was converted to energy production (which includes new wind, natural gas, biomass, and solar production), while 68 percent of lost agricultural land was developed into homes and neighborhoods. And solar, unlike housing developments, can be returned to agricultural land at the end of its useful life.”

So here’s what we want to know. Where are the protesters standing up a zoning meetings to oppose more and more housing developments that suck up farmland and turn it into cul-de-sacs, golf courses, and roads? Where are the people protesting that all those tract houses are destroying the rural character of communities? Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is so much hypocrisy behind the anti-solar gangs that it makes us gag.

Lies, Damned Lies, & NIMBY

5% versus 68% and people want to blame solar for ruining rural life? Oh, please. Get over yourselves with your bleating and fake concern for farmers, many of whom have found the income they derive from solar farms is the difference between staying in business and selling out to developers and going to live in a one bedroom condo in Terre Haute. Spare us your fake piousness about your precious rural character. That act has worn so thin it is threadbare. Everybody knows the agitators are funded — directly or indirectly — by fossil fuel interests, so get over yourselves and go get a real job.

Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford has invested a lot of time thinking about this very issue and has some pearls of wisdom he shares with us in this video.

Coal Is Dirty, Unreliable, & Costly

Another tired old myth is that renewables are unreliable because, as every one knows, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. The piece nobody wants to talk about is battery storage, which is getting cheaper by the hour, it seems.

On his Substack blog today, Bill McKibben points out the declining cost of energy storage batteries has become one of the biggest selling points for renewables. Solar plus batteries are credited with stabilizing the Texas grid this summer during record high temperatures when demand for air conditioning soared.

“What doesn’t help,” he asked? “Coal. The newest, biggest coal fired power plant in the US, also in Texas, went offline after a catastrophic accident in April. It now appears it will be out of service until…April 2027.” Yikes!

Seth Feaster of the Institute For Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says that outage is disturbingly similar to operating problems at Comanche 3, a 750 MW coal-fired unit in Colorado that came online in 2010 and is majority owned by Xcel Energy. Since it began operating, it has had a history of unexpected and costly outages that culminated in a year long closure starting in January 2020 that was caused by a catastrophic loss of lubricating oil, extensively damaging the turbine and generator.

Facing a backlash from ratepayers and the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, Xcel ultimately reached an agreement to close the plant in 2030, some 40 years earlier than its originally planned retirement, Feaster reports. As part of that settlement, Xcel also agreed to gradually step down the use of the plant between 2025 and 2030.

But the agreement is under threat from the US government, which is suddenly in love with coal again. It made a lot of noise recently about opening federally owned land for coal extraction. How embarrassing, then, that the first auction, which took place last week, drew just one bidder, who offered to buy the coal for the magnificent sum of one tenth of a cent per ton! What a deal for US taxpayers!

Picking Winners & Losers

The administration, which is top-heavy with true believers who claim government should not be picking winners and losers in the marketplace, is doing precisely that as it pressures utilities to keep their coal-fired generating stations open regardless of the cost to ratepayers and the reliability of the plants. It’s all part of the great scam known as the “energy emergency” the administration has created our of whole cloth to please its generous donors.

Meanwhile, China continues to be the primary supplier of renewable energy technology and equipment to the world, McKibben writes. Liz Thompson, a former UN assistant secretary-general and now climate change ambassador for Barbados, said recently that just as climate-vulnerable states are hit by more disasters, they are hampered in their response because of a lack of access to technology and financing. “These challenges provide compelling reasons to work more closely with China,” she said.

Clean Energy Is Making China A World Leader

Chinese officials and business leaders are keen to oblige, McKibben points out. Zhang Shiguo, executive director of China New Energy International Alliance, an organization backed by government associations and renewable companies, said the country’s green products had already reached 170 countries. “The reason China’s new energy sector has done well is the determination to act,” Zhang added.

And act it has. Bloomberg reported this week that the US, which has positioned itself as a major fossil fuel exporter, sold $80 billion in oil and gas abroad through July, the last month with data available. China exported $120 billion in green technology over the same period. To which McKibben adds, “With that number, you can feel world leadership passing from Washington to Beijing. It’s even more remarkable because the things that China is mostly exporting — solar panels — keep getting cheaper and cheaper.”

The insanity and viciousness of the current administration knows no bounds. Russell Vought and the sycophants who support him will not rest until the Constitution has been rendered null and void with the active concurrence of the Supreme Court and the Repugnican Quislings in Congress who are petrified to show they have a conscience.

The end of American Exceptionalism is imminent.