Yea, but it says more about how bad corn biofuels are than how good solar is. Also, Iowa is too far north for solar to do much good in the fight against AGW. If you want solar, move to Mexico (or even New Mexico) where it actually makes environmental sense.
It would obviously be better in terms of per-panel efficiencies to be further south, but solar is still effective much further north than 40N. Nearly all of Europe from Madrid northward is higher latitude than that. And since Iowa has people there, the costs and losses of getting energy from Mexico to Iowa may outweigh much of the advantages for quite some time.
Assuming solar isn't displaced by something else, one day we'll presumably see highly insolated areas exporting power over huge interconnects, but for now, fitting a panel basically anywhere is still better than not fitting it at all.
> Also, Iowa is too far north for solar to do much good in the fight against AGW.
Absolutely not, Iowa is great for solar, it often provides more income than corn (and corn has massive subsidies), and is certainly better than most of Europe. Iowa really is not very far north
Generating solar power in Mexico won't keep Iowans from warming their homes with natural gas and powering their F-150s with petroleum, so solar panels in Iowa are needed for the fight against AGW.
The problem is that more energy is required and more CO2 produced in making the panels than they replace during their use. So in Iowa, using solar actually increases CO2 production, not decreases it. Somehow you are missing that.
Solar's EROEI is only 4. So anywhere with a solar albino of less than .25 means solar there does more harm than good. NASA Goddard provides a map of where that is. From memory, I believe Iowa's is about .22. The breakeven line roughly goes through San Francisco.
No, all of that is false. Some of it was true at one point, but it has been false for decades. There is no such thing as "solar albino". I would think it was easy to find the correct information. Where are you getting this false information?
It also ignores the reason why corn biofuels exist, because we subsidize corn production for national security reasons and there's a ton of extra produced so they try and find profitable uses for it.
