(1/?)
@TechConnectify a few points about the corn ethanol vs. solar farm comparison;
According to permaculturist David Blume, author of Alcohol Can Be a Gas, corn is one of the lowest yield/acre ethanol feedstocks. The only reason it's used for fuel is that it's massively overproduced. Because of corn farming subsidies that started in the 1930s, and were increased in the 1980s.
(2/?)
So using less corn ethanol is not going to free up land. The corn will just be redirected into some other white elephant project. The only thing that can reduce the amount of land used by corn farming is to dial down and eventually abolish corn subsidies.
Secondly, when that's achieved, there are plenty of better things to do that fertile land than covering them with solar panels. Such as returning them to wild prairie. Or to mixed, organic farming, to grow food for local needs.
(3/?)
Thirdly, there are at least 2 downsides of centralised solar farms you didn't acknowledge in your video. One is the massive energy losses involved in transmitting that electricity from the farm to the places it's used. A MW produced at a centralised farm is *not* a million MW available at point of use. A MW produced on your roof, pretty much is. A MW produced on the roof of your local school, library, supermarket or other large buildings found in most neighborhoods gets pretty close.
(4/?)
The other downside of centralised solar farms was presented in your video as if it's a positive; they enable rentiers to extract economic rents from every watt of electricity produced by solar panels. Whereas with rooftop solar, entrepreneurs can only make a profit on selling you the panel, and maybe some associated services. So rooftop solar has to be much cheaper per watt for the person using the energy it produces than grid solar.
(5/?)
The efficiency differences of a centralised gas plant vs. a small gas generator do not apply here. In fact, the efficiency difference is reversed with solar because of transmission losses.
But what does still apply is the resilience benefit of having a small energy generator in the building where the energy is used. If the solar panels whose energy you depend on are miles away, connected by transmission lines, you can lose your energy supply much more easily.
(6/?)
I agree that on balance it's a good thing that financial extractors ("investors") are seeing renewable energy plants as better investment opportunities than fossil burning plants. But only because that starves proposed fossil plants of funding. Not because extractors clipping the ticket on otherwise free energy is a good thing.
Also, you know what also reduces demand for fossil fuel power plants, and thus the appeal of funding them? Rooftop solar and other localised energy generation.
(7/?)
There's a lot of talk these days about the negative political-economic consequences of centralising internet servers into hyperscale datacentres controlled by financial extractors. How much better could the internet be for our society if servers were distributed around the homes and workplaces where they're used, under the control of the people using them?
The same logic applies to renewable energy generation. Let's not make the same mistake as we did with the net infrastructure rollout.
