TL;DR:

[…] it would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generated by one hectare of land covered in solar panels.

Which is why any handwringing about “food not solar” is an entirely artificial grassroots campaign by the fossil fuel industry and right wing interests. We should transfer our ethanol corn fields to solar asap.

When this topic pops up I sometimes see people commenting about ethanol in Brazil, so might as well highlight a difference: that ethanol is mostly made of molasses, a byproduct.

Molasses are often sold “as is”, but there’s almost no market for them, in contrast with white sugar. So fermenting and distilling them (into either molasses rum or fuel) is a good option, and if anything it’s more like repurposing what would otherwise go to waste.

So, note the situation is completely different from growing maize for ethanol, where you’d use otherwise useful arable land with maize just for fuel.

This reminds me a lot of Technology Connection’s video about renewable energy where he brings up pretty much the same point.

Fuck ethanol and biofuels. They’re a scam on several different levels, but it is especially horrible how much farmland they waste with it for absolutely no redeeming value. It’s not scalable or sustainable and it never was, it’s just a way to greenwash fossil fuels so they don’t look so bad and so that as long as they keep pumping it out of the ground they can use ethanol to pretend you’re getting “green fuel” despite all the petroleum products used to make it and all the petroleum products it gets mixed with. The only good thing about ethanol is that it is really good at making small seasonal engines unreliable and maintenance prone, which makes electric equipment much more attractive in comparison. Score one for the good guys I guess, and score about 20 for the fossil fuel industry because that’s mainly who ethanol benefits.

But people can’t really eat volts. At least not directly.