No, I don’t mean the grammatically-challenged screaming all-caps claim that any state with renewable energy growth is seeing record-breaking increases in electricity costs. That’s easily refuted. Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota each generate more than half their electrical power from wind at electricity rates much lower than those of states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania where solar and wind are a negligible share of the energy mix. Interested readers can check the year-to-year trend for any state here.

What grabbed my attention was the phrase “farmer destroying Solar.” Where did that come from? What could it possibly mean? I found answers in an August 19^th press release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture with the following statement from Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins:

“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels. It has been disheartening to see our beautiful farmland displaced by solar projects, especially in rural areas that have strong agricultural heritage. One of the largest barriers of entry for new and young farmers is access to land. Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available. We are no longer allowing businesses to use your taxpayer dollars to fund solar projects on prime American farmland, and we will no longer allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in our USDA-funded projects.”

Some attacks on renewable energy are so crude, so obviously false, and so easily refuted that they are laughable. Secretary Rollins’ attack is more subtle; it appeals to widely held values (preserving farmland and farming jobs) and portrays solar energy in direct destructive opposition to those values. Never mind that leasing some land to solar developers can provide stable income for cash-strapped farmers, helping them to weather the next drought and continue farming. Never mind that urban development (not solar panels) is the leading cause of farmland loss. Never mind that climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels, is increasing loss of farmland to drought and floods. Never mind that State Policy Network, a national political network funded by fossil fuel interests, is fighting to block renewable energy projects in rural areas. But let’s agree that preserving farmland is a worthy cause. Preserving farmland to grow food is certainly worthy.

Currently, about 30 million acres of prime U.S. farmland is used to grow corn which is turned into ethanol and blended with gasoline. That’s 40% of America’s corn crop devoted not to food production, but energy for transportation. A tiny fraction of that land devoted to solar power could produce the same energy. That’s because solar panels are far better than corn plants at converting sunlight to fuel. A recent paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) quantified the advantage: a solar energy farm produces about 30 times more energy per acre. Wait! It gets better. The electrical energy from solar panels is much more valuable for transportation than the chemical energy of ethanol. That’s because electric motors are 3 to 4 times more efficient than gasoline engines in converting fuel energy to miles traveled. (Gasoline engines convert most of their fuel energy to waste heat rather than motion.) The 30 times greater efficiency of solar energy generation multiplied by the 3 to 4 times greater energy efficiency of electric transportation means that an acre of land devoted to solar power will produce as much useful energy for transportation as 90 to 120 acres devoted to ethanol from corn. In other words, as the U.S. gradually transitions to electric vehicles, roughly 0.3 million acres devoted to solar energy would replace the transportation energy provided by ethanol, and nearly 30 million acres of prime U.S. farmland could be returned to food production.

Let’s take the question of land loss a step further. A study, published in 2015 in the journal Science, assessed cumulative environmental impacts of oil and gas development in the U.S. between 2000 and 2012 (see the figure below). Among other impacts during that period, 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of land was given over to well pads and related roads for fracking of oil and gas. About 3 million acres of that was cropland and 0.7 million acres was forest. (By now, the cumulative destruction must be much larger, as approximately 5,000 new wells are drilled each year to maintain production.) Just as roughly 0.3 million acres devoted to solar energy could replace all the corn ethanol currently produced in the U.S., 7.4 million acres devoted to solar energy could replace all the gasoline currently pumped – with clean energy to spare for other needs.