Yes, that's huge. The big numbers can look overwhelming. Huge land-use changes that we've already made would look overwhelming if considered as a single monolit

Yes, that's huge. The big numbers can look overwhelming. Huge land-use changes that we've already made would look overwhelming if considered as a single monolithic project. Solar facility construction isn't going to be a single monolithic project any more than the existing American biofuel or fossil fuel systems were. http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/04/corn-consumption-and-acreage.html http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/04/corn-consumption-an... 2016 numbers: about 93.6 million acres planted for corn. About 5.2 billion bushels out of 14.4 billion bushels of corn yield went to corn ethanol. If harvest and land area are proportionate, that's about 33.7 million acres dedicated to corn ethanol [1]. 33.7 million acres is about 136,000 km^2. The areal energy yield from biofuels is paltry compared to what you can get from solar PV. Manufacturing/installing solar PV is more resource-intense than planting corn. But it's low-maintenance once installed. It doesn't require arable land, weeding, irrigation, fertilizer, or harvesting. [1] Yes, the residual material left after fermentation is also used as animal feed. But the conversion efficiency is low; you're not adding many calories per acre to the human food supply when corn is fermented and leftovers go to cattle.