Would an acre of solar panels yield more useful(grid) energy than an acre of corn?

Question

that is more gals of fossil eqivalent fuel? Given that each gal of biofuel displaces some amount of fossil fuel that would go into a powerplant. and that the corn grows for say 3 months. so 3mos of photosynthesis vs photovoltaic.

Answer 1

These guys seem to think so.

I don't think that even Al Gore could afford that many Solar Panels though.

Answer 2

It has been theorized that a solar panel grid 25 miles square would generate enough electricity for the needs of the entire United States!

Answer 3

There are more than 1 type of solar panel. CA is in the process of getting a large solar farm. I don't know acre for acre which would produce more, but this technology is far more efficient than the PV panels on the average home.

Answer 4

Planting an acre of corn is not all that is involved.

The corn needs water, plant nutrients, some protection from weeds and insects, harvesting, planting tillage, and of course processing to make ethanol.

If you set out to grow corn in the desert where you might be planting that acre of  PV panels, and did not provide a lot of extra energy plus water, you would not get energy, so PV would produce much more.

In the middle of a Kansas corn field, the most favourable place to grow the corn, the gross output of ethanol would come close to the output of solar panels but the net energy yield would be far less even though the solar panels would produce far less than they would in the desert.

Now comes the cost aspect. solar panels are likely much more capital intensive. They barely pay for their cost in the desert, and far less in Kansas.

Here is the problem. Ethanol plants too are capital intensive. At corn prices a couple years ago we thought that ethanol plants would be a gold mine. They are barely breaking even with current corn prices.

If ethanol production is not economical for ethanol manufacturers we expect corn prices to fall so that farmers will want out.

A desert covered with PV panels will produce more energy than a Kansas corn field, A Kansas PV field will outproduce an acre of desert corn.

If you plan to cover an acre of land with PV, do it in the desert. If you plan to grow an acre of corn, do it in Kansas.

In Kansas, growing corn or PV, you use up a good acre of food production capacity.

In the desert, you use up some hot rock or sand.

Answer 5

Who cares if you can or can't eat solar panels?  

Why don't we, as a country, just decide once and for all to take a few hundred square miles of land, interspersed around the southwest to put solar panels on to quench our need for electricity?  We can use existing hydroelectric and nuclear resources as well as greatly expanded wind farms to power the country at night.

I'm not even saying that I necessarily believe in the whole "global warming is caused by greenhouse gasses" argument.  But it would behoove us to do this if only to extricate ourselves from the quagmire that is the Middle East.

Answer 6

Eating solar panels? Yummy!!!

Seriously though, it stands to reason that since corn is a seasonal crop and the solar panels produce power even in the winter as long at the sun can get through that solar panels would produce more power.

Here's the thing though. We are talking about 2 different kinds of farms, and an old farmer's wise tale tells us not to put all our eggs in one basket. Instead of building a single huge solar farm, we should spread the solar collectors out. That way if the sun isn't shining in an area, we don't lose all the solar collector's functionality, just some of them.

Everyone's heard of a covered bridge. Well if we started building "cover's" over all the bridges in the world, and put solar collectors on the roofs...there's a huge amount of power being created, and a piece of nostalgia brought into our current way of life. Bridges are not the most attractive things anyway, and neither are the solar collectors.

Answer 7

yes, but can you eat solar panels?