Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
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You couldn’t come up with a less efficient form of solar power if you tried. It’s there to subsidize US farmers.
brazil produces more biofuel iirc
That may be. But as a percentage of farm income, the prices that corn (and soybeans to an extent) demands is driven by biofuel mandates within the US. If the only market was food and export, those prices would be substantially lower.
meaning what
Meaning that in the US biofuels are a very inefficient way of giving corn growers subsidies. That’s why congress has supported various biofuel requirements.
worry not brazil, also gives subsidies to the ethanol industry here, in part because we want to more independent of oil imports
They’ve also cut down a lot of rain forests to do it.
no, the rainforests cut go majority to cattle ranching
Both statements can be true.
Biofuels are a scam. They get worse mileage, it takes as much energy to make as it produces, the pollution is worse, it leads to toxic chemicals from the agriculture being introduced into the environment, and it raises the price of food.
All those talking points are courtesy of gas and oil. Any farming means toxic chemicals, ethanols only take energy because renewable sources are not used for distillation, and no farming used for ethanol comes from food crops.
Most of the corn grown in the US is not edible, it is grown to make oils, sugar and plastics. Biofuels are carbon capture, the carbon released from burning is captured in a cycle for growth in the next season. But NY has several PR firms paid millions a years to counter biofuels , but in countries like Brazil where biofuels are common, people prefer E90 because of lower cost and motors lasting longer because of no gasoline burning by-products.
lol okay I get being suspicious of oil and gas bs, but some of what you said about ethanol is just not right…
In the US most ethanol is made from corn. It’s usually field corn, not the kind you eat like corn on the cob, but it’s still part of the food system. It turns into animal feed and all the corn ingredients in processed food, so saying “no ethanol comes from food crops” doesn’t really hold up.
Also yeah you could power the distillation with renewables, cool, but that doesn’t magically fix the bigger issues people point to: growing more corn usually means more fertilizer and more runoff and more land pressure. You know how much fertilizer corn takes?
That’s not just “oil talking points,” that’s just what happens when you scale it… i’m not saying ethanol is pure evil or whatever, but dismissing the criticism as all oil propaganda is doing the same thing in reverse. It’s certainly not the climate justice solution they’ve sold it as.
It’s unfortunate the arguments are in favor of oil, but they are true, those aren’t arguments the oil companies made through their bullshit mercenary scientific outfits, those are from real studies that have been made and reported on by real scientists and do gooders over the decades. And reported in real publications, from newspapers, back when those still existed, to periodicals.
The pesticides and fertilizers from corn are not something to slough off, it’s systematic pollution at this point, and they use more and worse chemicals for the stuff that’s not for human consumption.
A good share of corn is used to make ethanol, I don’t doubt they use the leftovers from that to make plastics, that’s exactly the problem it drives food prices up taking away agricultural land by subsidizing inefficient fuel production, started during the Bush Administration by the way, the ultimate whores to big oil.
Corn oil and syrup/sugar, is for human consumption, and included in what we call food. It’s also subsidized and driving bad outcomes but that’s another story. 5% of the continental united states is corn. 5% of the total land in the lower 48 is devoted to corn. Think about that. There is only one larger crop, grass. Worthless lawns, although Idk if that is measured in land coverage or weight of the product to be honest.
Instructions unclear, re-invaded Poland.
O kurwa, znowu to samo.
“they were invited” german tour guide in family guy
Here’s a whole article on agrovoltaics. IIRC, they require less water because of the shade. https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/northwest/topic/agrivoltaics-pairing-solar-power-and-agriculture-northwest
Archive because who knows what they’ll do next: https://archive.is/n4jF8
The big enemy is transportation. You can put biofuel in a container and it will keep for a very long time. It’s easy to ship anywhere you’d like in large quantities. It can be pumped around using pipelines, it can be put in ships, boats and fuel trucks and brought to just about anywhere. Even places that don’t have permanent infrastructure can often easily be reached by truck and transport a huge amount of energy in one go. Those fuels are very energy dense, so transport is easy and cheap and it doesn’t lose any energy from being transported.
With electric energy transport is much harder, you need large transformer stations to get it up to high voltages and then you need fixed infrastructure to transport it anywhere. And on the receiving side you’d also need large stations to be able to use the energy and distribute it further. And every step loses energy, the conversion up to high voltage, the transport over the powerlines and then the conversion back down. Reaching places that don’t have fixed infrastructure is much harder, as we don’t have very good storage options for electrical energy. Best we can do is chemical storage in the form of large and heavy batteries that aren’t as energy dense as biofuel.
However solar has a trick up it’s sleeve where it’s super easy to generate the energy where you need it, reducing the need for transport. Different from other power generation options you don’t need a whole lot to generate some energy. For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car. Putting solar in places we need energy is the trick to a sustainable future (although we need to fix some issues with solar, but it’s pretty good as it is). Having a bit of biofuel as an alternative can be pretty handy though and is better than fossil fuels for sure.
I disagree , electricity transportation is superior to fossil fuel transportation. 40% of all oceanic shipping traffic is for fossil fuels, which consumes more energy. Plus all of the land based fossil fuel shipping. Investing in grid infrastructure makes the grid more resilient to disasters and distributes energy more directly and efficiently than by vehicle or pipeline. Plus the benefits of less congested shipping, rail, and road routes, less air pollution, and less noise pollution for sea life.
I think people forget that if we build enough solar, we’ll have such an energy surplus that it’ll be essentially free to electrify stuff and use that energy.
Losses from transformation and transmission go away as soon as the resource is unlimited.
A small nitpick about the 40% figure: different type of oceanic shipping are “counted” different ways. Crude/products (and bulks) are counted by deadweight (DWT) while container shipping is counted by twenty foot equivalent units (TEU). Passenger ships by people, RoRo/PCTCs by lane miles, etc. There are other more esoteric examples as well.
I think the important metric here is fuel burned: how much fuel do we burn just to ship fuel to where it can be refined, and then to where it’s needed?
Indeed, this would be a key metric, and probably someone has already done this work. If my hedging guy (who also covers our EUA/ETS biz) in London has this data, I’ll post it.
This is exactly right. Like it or not, an easily transportable, easily stored energy source is hugely important to modern society.
Can 75% or more of average road traffic be addressed through electric cars and induction roadways? Absolutely. And we should keep going with the conversion so that high energy density needs like construction mining, large-scale transportation, etc. have access to remaining petroleum fuels. On top of getting diesel-fueled plants out of the power grid.
This isn’t even hard. Does the vehicle need a CDL to drive? No? Then make it electric. Do you need special tests, licenses, and insurance to drive the vehicle? Does it weigh over 3 tons? Great, use that diesel all you like. No, your Ford F-350 SuperDuty does not entitle you to roll coal just to drive to and from your job at Bass Pro Shop, Dale.
No, your Ford F-350 SuperDuty does not entitle you to roll coal just to drive to and from your job at Bass Pro Shop, Dale.
I think if we just tax vehicles at the rate they destroy the road, we’d quickly see folks stop having giant vehicles. Set the standard as a bicycle (and be unreasonable about the weight, so 25kg), and then use the lovely X^4 function to determine how much to tax.
A bicycle (and let’s just say the average person is 100kg, and added to the bicycle’s weight, to be unreasonable again) costs $0.50 to register… while the f350 (found a weight for the lightest around 6000 lbs, or 2721.5kg) should be about $0.50 * (2721.5kg/125kg)^4 = $112347.47. I think that would do just fine. Maybe we could adjust down a little, so the bike could be $0.05, and the truck $11234.75.
Yes, but that makes sense. Don’t you know that’s not allowed?! /s
I know… and I also know that we currently depend on truck rigs for shipping in everything, so the taxes would ultimately focus on them MUCH MORE than even the assholes in their coal rollers. That would mean the ‘punishing’ factor of the taxation would be diluted for them, even if we used GCWR of a vehicle as the standard for taxing.
Sadly, this isn’t a “the market can handle it” thing either. Gas stations have underground tanks which have to be dug up and disposed of before the land can be used again, and it’s expensive. So gasoline infrastructure will remain for a while regardless of how many gas powered vehicles there are.
“very long time” here is like, 6 months to a year. Fuel does break down, a sad reality that anyone who has tried to start a lawn mower in the spring after letting it sit full of fuel all winter can tell you.
But! That is quite a bit longer than electricity, which needs to be used pretty much immediately or it’ll start blowing up transformers.
Logistics is the primary issue. We can’t generate power anywhere it needs to be pretty close to where it’s being used. Unless we want to ship giant fucking batteries all over the place which in some circumstances might not be a bad idea. Not ideal though. Still, if we’re putting biofuel on a truck, it’s worth considering. I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
That said, we can build these things to make energy transmission possible over long distances. Shit if we’re making enough excess energy from solar alone we could beam it across the sky with microwaves if we really wanted to. The barrier here is not that it is hard. The barrier here is that liquid fuel is still so goddamn profitable there’s no incentive to switch.
I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
Fuel is about 25 times more energy dense compared to batteries. Of course depending on the fuel and depending on the batteries. 25 times is most diesel fuels compared to most modern li-ion batteries. Large LiFePO4 would probably be used for transport, which do worse than high performance LiCoO2 batteries, so then you are talking about somewhere around 30 times worse. Transporting batteries simply isn’t worth doing, it’s super inefficient.
Same with stuff like microwave transmission of power, you lose so much in the transfer, it’s a total non starter.
Oh yeah, it’s inefficient as hell. But energy from the sun is coming to us whether we harvest it or not. It’s unlimited. The limitation is solar cells.
We’re at the point where we’ve basically run out of easy oil to access, and we’re coming up with bigger and deeper drilling methods. We spend billions on a single offshore rig that will function for 10-20 years at most.
The issue isn’t efficiency, it’s profit motive.
We can’t generate power anywhere it needs to be pretty close to where it’s being used.
Residential and Commercial & Industrial (C&I) Solar + Storage (SS) disproves this.
For transportation, I agree it’s tough. Germany trialed a highway designed with overhead catenary power lines like electrified trains use but for trucks. Can’t remember if it was successful or not. Shouldn’t be hard to build out catenaries across national highways. The circuits can be aluminum to save on costs, and you incentivize adding generation along highways, further giving reason to build EV charging stations.
Electrification can’t fix everything, sure, but I think we should be ramping it up more than we already have.
For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car.
Unfortunately panels don’t generate a lot, if anything at all, when the electric car is at home, often in the evening/night. You could add a home battery as storage, but that is, at least in my country, quite expensive and doesn’t have the capacity to bridge that gap in an economically feasible way.
Then there’s the problem with having your own driveway: that’s not the standard here, so depending on the distance to the nearest parking spot it’s often also not very feasible to hook up your car to your own grid.
Of course there’s also the late autumn and winter period where your panels will not produce enough for the average home, especially if you are heating with an heat pump. Which is rapidly becoming the standard here.
And as the cherry on top: our power grid has a hard time handling the strain of solar panels dumping their excess power during daytime. For this reason here you pay a fee for generated power returned to the net. Currently you still receive a compensation which is usually higher than the fee, but people are fearing that in the next few years solar panels might start costing money. This heavily impacts the return on investment, which unfortunately needs to be a consideration for a lot of people as their wallet has a limit.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for moving to renewables and I do not have anything against solar power. But it is definitely not a magical solution and comes with its own set of problems that need to be tackled.
We really should be looking more into reducing car dependency as well.
That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),
Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)
All it takes is political willpower and courage to change stuff for the better, we (humanity) are smart enough to find solutions, we just don’t have the courage, right now and do stupid things out of fear (like voting for people who claim to give security but do only more fear mongering only to sell more security measures that don’t solve any problems long term)
Just like mayor fisk
No thanks, we prefer to vote for people who blame immigrants for all problems we are told we have.
That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),
Yup, which I’ve been doing for the last two decades and keep on doing, even though financially right-wing would serve my interests better.
Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)
We have variable pricing available here, the problem is that having ADHD I need structure in my day and week. Guess I lack the courage, but having to plan chores around when prices are expected to be low sounds like a complete disaster scenario for me.
😂 i can relate, but I imagined that you can program it to sell if higher than x and buy when lower than y, and you tell it that at tt:mm you need z kwh ready 😄
If you’re driving a car every day, you’re the problem
Good strategy, blame individuals for systemic problems lol
We have fuel tanker trucks and rail cars already. Could we not run a similar arrangement with batteries on a truck or train car?
Batteries carry a lot less energy per kilogram, so transporting them uses more energy than transporting biofuels. You also have to carry empty batteries back to the source rather than it being a one way trip. It could be feasible on rails, but those are two major limitations compared to just running some big cables over land. The weight problem also means that some amount of combustible fuel will always be necessary, since batteries and aviation are not compatible.
Hence why we should work towards vehicles like The Cyclops with power outlets
Turns out turning sunlight into food and then burning it is very inefficient, who could have guessed /s
It’s not an inefficient way to turn political donations into federal subsidies though, and that’s the real point of it. It’s horribly inefficient, worse pollution, worse mileage, takes as much energy to make as they get from it, leads to overuse of chemicals that get everywhere, and raises food prices.
None of that matters a whit, because it turns donations to lawmakers into huge subsidies to agribusiness, the majority of which get claimed by the few remaining gatekeeping conglomerates in the agricultural sector.
How about putting that farmland back to producing food, and covering all our rooftops and carparks with solar panels?
Its even more efficient. In Poland we have that project, where food is grown under solar panels - they harvest even more than before, because panels protect plants from too much sun.
I second this, if you design your solar panels well, not only do you get to outpu a lot of electricity, yiu actually increase your crop/cattle etc yield
Please. I used to live in RI and driving through ri and ma you will regularly see ACRE upon ACRE of woodland mowed down, flattened, and thousanda of gaudy panels put up in what was once public lands and wooded areas. They do this right outside of the Worcester city limits like they don’t have acre upon ACRE of already developed paved over areas that could benefit from shade from solar panels(think car parks, strap mall and dept store building roofs, residential roofs etc). I’m all for solar but I hate when they destroy nature for no reason. I’m not stupid I know it’s easier to build them on a level earth than on rooftops but we only have so much land available as it is why not be more efficient with the land we have already used?
It was a metaphor, no one is thinking of replacing farmland with solar panels.
And this whole thread ignores inclement weather. A few years ago Texas had 35MW of solar panels destroyed in minutes by hail. Hurricanes and tornadoes will do the same thing.
It was a metaphor, no one is thinking of replacing farmland with solar panels.
Fair point. It’s just the idea of using perfectly good farmland to fuel cars feels like a fucked up priority to me.
Hurricanes and Tornados can, and do, do the same to refineries too.
Farmland installs can be cheaper.
If combined with farming it can protect yields but is more costly, but that’s another topic
There is already an over production of food. We don’t need to grow more food.
I don’t know about that, but we certainly need to waste less food, and removing the profit motive from it’s production might help getting it to the people that need it but can’t get it. There are still people in the world starving needlessly.
We both grow more than we need, and throw more than we should away.
Some of that is a result of picky shoppers wanting unblemished produce. Some of that is a result of not having an
easyprofit motivated way of getting produce from where it’s grown to where it’s most desperately needed.We have tropical fruit available all year, but when impoverished peoples experience a crop failure, best we can do is send powdered milk.
Which incidentally may have cured them of lactose intolerance.
People are starving because capitalists would rather throw away perfectly good food and put bleach on it than give it to the starving to maximize their profits
That’s why I said removing the profit motive would be a good thing.
you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on biofuels from the same amount of land.
that and biofuels only land could produce the same as existing global electricity demand are bigger takeaways.
Article undersells the 7000twh of existing car+truck energy. With just 75% efficiency for solar panel to EV wheel, just 2366twh of solar would replace the ICE twh to wheel equivalent fuel consumption. So, the land conversion formula allows for 10x the number of cars and trucks. Even H2 electrolysis would permit 7x the number of cars and trucks (ensuring lighter trucks/cars as well) from biofuels land.
Saddly 75% is still a pipe dream, lucky to get 40% from panel to road. Not that biofuel is not one of if not the worst use of land mind you.
The DC-AC-DC conversion loop does cost 15% or so. LiFePo batteries (better than NMC) 10%, and motor 10-15%. AC grid transmission losses add more.
With home solar, DC charging (hopefully bidirectional), 75%-80% efficiency to the wheel. But sure, AC grid tied charging could drop it by 20%. Still better than 60% losses.
Comparing to ICE engines, its fair to exclude transmission losses (exists in both. about 5%), and there is regen available for EV, and it doesn’t idle. My original 75% claim may be too generous, but 3x efficiency of ICE is still fair.
Evs are 75% to 90% efficient from their battery, but the real issue is solar on the grid. Its way more then 20% loss from the grid, hell 40% loss in transmission is normal around here, and that’s just last run. The issue is that its loss on every step. I think local solar is the way to go for ev charging but this is clearly about mass deployment and that means the grid.
Now do lithium mine externalities.
Again, our proposal isn’t that we should cover all of this land in solar panels, or that it could easily power the world on its own. We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining). We’re just trying to get a sense of perspective for how much electricity could be produced by using that land in more efficient ways.
Now do iron and aluminum mine externalities for ICE cars, which carry hundreds of pounds extra of those metals, plus much rarer cataysts like platinum and rubidium. The business community keeps quoting one white paper written by Volvo on this, but of course, no one actually read that paper because the authors saw fit to exclude the metals used in engines and transmissions in ICE cars when comparing to EVs. There is so much bullshit math on both sides of this argument, no one is realizing how we are getting distracted from major sources of pollution that continue unfettered like shipping, air travel and cement production.
ICE engines are mostly cast aluminum, which can be recycled trivially and indefinitely with renewable energy and no environmental harm.
Lithium batteries cannot be recycled without environmental harm.
Biofuels (due to inefficiency) are net negative emitters.
Oil refining uses an insane amount of energy.
An electric car could travel 60km (or more) on the electricity used to refine enough fuel to drive 100km.
What about the required raw materials to fabricate the solar panels? What about aging and recyclability percentage?
I don’t say, abandon solar power. I say: improve the recycling rate of the panels. Dual use agricultural land, maybe try to take advantage of the panel’s properties (shadows cast by the panels, wind erosion idk).
And maybe don’t overspend on the world’s energy budget. Evaluate where cars for personal transportation are really needed and how the fuel efficiency could be raised.
Mass transportation complemented by rental bikes and scooters - it’s mostly an infrastructural change, which leads to reduced fuel consumption.
Car sharing: One could aim to increase the frequency of use per vehicle - less cars to build, less space required for parking lots and streets.
Sometimes a web conference instead of a lengthy journey is sufficient. Home office - Maybe commuting 3 of 5 days is enough?
The possibilities are endless. Don’t focus too much on one aspect.
While that is technically true, that is not the best use for that land, nor is it a good way to setup solar.
There are so many places we could install solar before we even have to touch agriculture.
Rooftop solar is expensive for a lot of people unfortunately because it’s paid by the household installing them (government subsidies help, but even if gvt is paying 50% of your 20k solar install, 10k is still a lot of money). But there’s ways for businesses and municipalities to install solar.
Without getting into reducing car dependency (which is also important), I maintain that every car park of any significant size should have solar. We’re going electric anyway, this makes the EV chargers slightly cheaper to operate (and when nobody is charging, should make some money back) and there’d be shade in the summer, as well as slight protection from snow in the winter. Everyone wins. The owner of the solar, the people parking, etc.
Mandating rooftop solar on all non-historic government buildings at any level of government would also be helpful. I’m sure there could be countries already doing it - I’m advocating for more countries to start doing it.
Also for businesses and communities to install solar, there’s crowdfinancing apps to get loans. Goparity has a bunch of solar projects. I’ve contributed negligible sums to a few, figuring that it might be a riskier investment than say index funds, but at the very least I’m contributing to something good happening to the planet I live on. There are other alternatives too, that’s just the one I’m using.
We’re not going battery electric. We’re going bus grid electric and bicycle.
What they’re saying is this is only tangentially agriculture. We grow crops, process them, and make additives for fuel or just fuel. If we stopped doing all that, we could provide enough electricity to make all the cars electric.
This, of course, doesn’t take into consideration things such as battery requirements, etc. but it does give perspective on just how much land is being used for some small fraction of car fuel, and how absurd biofuel is, given how little we actually use relative to our overall fuel use.
Edit: everything else you said is true, but even turning biofuel land into grazing land and having it covered by solar panels would be more useful. And we need more batteries.
Or you could just do ground mount arrays somewhere because it’s way cheaper to install and who cares about a 1% or whatever change in land usage.
Ground-mount is good economically, but ecologically not so much.
If we can build more Solar + Storage (SS) in suburban and urban contexts, then we can capitalize on the land that’s already being used for human purposes - leaving other land able to be rewilded.
I grew up in the Midwest of the US, and as I got older it was so disheartening to see how chopped up the natural world is in between large fields of corns, soy, and wheat. I don’t want the land that’s being used currently for industrial agriculture to be used for utility-scale solar. But I realize my wishes and dreams don’t mean much when the people that own these properties have financial incentives to build solar anyways.
I think we need to have more legislation about re-wilding and regenerating nature in the US apart from conserving what we have. Building solar on the already built environment is one way to prevent barriers to that regeneration.
In a perfect world sure but I categorically refuse to care about the land usage of solar when we waste so much more land on stuff that is actively harming the planet. Once the cost of moving the grid to 100% renewables is no longer the barrier then we should care about reinstalling the panels somewhere else.
Every MW of solar not built is a MW of natural gas being burned. Until that’s not the case building more renewable energy should be the top priority.
As much as it pains me, I think this should all be our ultimate concern if we want to defeat fossil fuels.
Depends on the location. Around me, they’re sometimes close to towns where the land could otherwise be used for homes or businesses in the medium-term future.
Also land is still a limited resource in much of the world. Why not use one piece of land for multiple purposes?
For sparsely populated areas I’ll agree with you. Here in Europe, there’s not a lot of completely unused land and in my country in particular most “unused” land is forests and bogs which have value of their own (sadly only 5% is wetlands nowadays - used to be over 20% before the soviets drained most of it). I’d much prefer those to remain untouched by both agriculture AND solar energy. Doing agriculture in a city is kinda hard, but solar is not. As a bonus, if solar panels in cities displace some of the demand for biofuels, that’s biofuel-related land that could be used for something else.
You don’t need unused land you just need to displace agriculture. If you have any land used for cattle grazing for example you can have enough grass to feed 1 cow or you can have enough solar to power 20-40 homes. Pretty obvious to me which is the more productive land usage there.
Or keep the cow and put solar on rooftops, car parks, etc. The cow shits out natural fertilizer which helps the land recover quicker so it can be used to produce more productive (in terms of people fed) crops again while the cow goes and grazes somewhere else where the soil’s no longer very productive.
It’s not a lot of land, sure, but there’s literally zero downside to putting solar in places where shade is desirable anyway. Just mandating solar in car parks alone could provide a ridiculous amount of electricity in more car-dependent cities.
As a solar engineer building this stuff daily, I tend to agree with your solution of sub/urban solar rather than agrivoltaics.
Doesn’t mean you can do agrivoltaics in a sub/urban context though ;P
Legislation for solar roofs on car parks is a great start. It’s a win-win for space usage, just a more expensive installation. Korea just did some
Unfortunate that the person that made this article shot themself in the back of the head 3 times with a long range rifle.
??
Both authors seem to be alive:
Is this a pessimistic joke like movie’s where someone creates cold fusion so the government is after them to cover it up?
Yes
I only really asked because of the upvotes. It’s a bit upsetting how pessimistic the audience is
If you write movie’s, why don’t you also write author’s?
I’m on a phone (swipe autocomplete) and it was 4am when I couldn’t sleep (poor proofing)? You got upvote’s, impressive. <- Left another there for you
It would probably use less water too. Crops require a lot of water, and biofuel crops more than most. I’ve heard it’s putting a massive drain on the available water in some places.
