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America’s Cornfields Could Power the Future—With Solar Panels, Not Ethanol | Small solar farms could deliver big ecological and energy benefits, researchers find.
Small solar farms could deliver big ecological and energy benefits, researchers find.
By replacing just a sliver of the land used to grow corn for ethanol with solar panels, scientists say, the United States could dramatically boost its renewable energy production while restoring critical ecosystems and providing new income streams for farmers. “We demonstrated that even small injections of ecologically informed, highly efficient solar in vast cropland landscapes, largely used to produce ethanol fuel, can lead to great potential benefits for people and planet,” Steven Grodsky, senior author of the study, said in a release. In regions such as the Mississippi River Basin, where fertilizer runoff fuels massive “dead zones” in coastal waters, replacing some cornfields with solar arrays surrounded by perennial vegetation could cut nutrient pollution dramatically.
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