This has interested me and I did some research. I know a big chunk of corn produced in the US is used for ethanol to supplement fuel. I've seen more and more fields in Kansas being planted in corn than I ever remembered before.
According to the USDA here:
US Acreage Usage by Crop the US as a whole planted 92,692,000 acres in corn for 2021. That's a 2% increase over last year according to the research.
Then you look at how much of that was used for fuel supplement. That can be found here:
US Corn Portion used for Fuel Ethanol. It has dropped just a little bit in the last year but it's up to 5.05% of all corn produced.
Put those two things together and you get about 4,639,000 acres used for ethanol generation only. Take that into sq miles if you'd like to compare to some of the estimates for solar needs and you get 7,248 sq miles. That's a huge area. That's a lot of resources going into a very nitrogen heavy crop which then has an energy intensive as well to produce this, almost 2.5 MWH per acre of corn including cultivating the crop and refining it into ethanol (
Energy use to produce Ethanol). The kicker is that per the report ethanol market value is more for the ethanol usage than all other market values combined (corn oil, gluten feed, gluten meal...). If we just shifted corn production away from this to making it areas for solar we'd be way ahead in the energy game, use less water from things like the aquifers that keep getting pumped down to irrigate these crops and so forth. It's crazy how people don't see this.
Edit: Total energy usage per year to produce that Ethanol is 11,598,086 MWh, that's 11.5 TWh. Think about that for a moment.
.
