> roughly 12 million hectares of US farmland—an area the size of New York State—is currently devoted to corn crops that are farmed not for food, but for fuel.

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.

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