“The Ford government has slapped a moratorium on using farmlands for solar while simultaneously encouraging the use of hundreds of thousands of acres not to grow food, but to grow inefficient fuel feedstock. That’s a pretty terrible way to use food lands or reduce climate damage from car traffic.”
A Bulletin from the Ontario Clean Air Alliance – a not-for-profit citizens organization dedicated to protecting and preserving our environment
Posted March 24th, 2026 on Niagara At Large
Every year, roughly 600,000 acres of land in Ontario is devoted to growing corn to produce ethanol. This ethanol is then blended with gasoline with the intention of lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s a lot of land that is growing fuel, not food. And demand for that fuel is going to steadily decline as we switch from conventional internal combustion vehicles to EVs. In 2024, more than 20% of cars sold worldwide were EVs. In Canada, EV sales are rebounding with the restoration of federal purchase incentives, increased charging availability and surging gas prices.
And here’s the really important thing.
If we used some of this land to host solar energy instead of for producing ethanol, we would get a massively bigger energy bang for our buck:
- One hundred acres used to grow corn for ethanol can power 71 internal combustion cars.
- One hundred acres used for solar panels can power 4,330 EVs.
That’s an astounding gap driven by these key factors:
- Solar panels produce much more energy per acre than corn; and
- EVs waste little of the energy they consume whereas internal combustion cars waste most of it.
As our new report – Grow Fuel or Grow Power – shows, if we took less than 2% of the corn fields currently used to grow crops for ethanol and put solar panels on them instead, we could power the same number of vehicles currently fuelled by ethanol.
So as a climate solution, there is no question that ethanol is a dud when compared to the combination of solar and EVs. And that’s without even factoring in that corn is an energy-, water- and fertilizer-intensive crop. As it is, today’s cars can only accept a gasoline blend with a maximum of 15% ethanol, so we still need to use a lot of fossil fuels to get where we’re going.
The Ford government has slapped a moratorium on using farmlands for solar while simultaneously encouraging the use of hundreds of thousands of acres not to grow food, but to grow inefficient fuel feedstock. That’s a pretty terrible way to use food lands or reduce climate damage from car traffic.
At the same time, some solar opponents claim we lack enough area to deploy solar to meet the province’s growing electricity needs. Except here we have 600,000 acres of land currently being used for a substandard energy solution – not food. We could put a lot of this land back into real food production while using a fraction to produce solar energy that powers cleaner cars.
Our provincial government has a bad habit of betting on yesterday’s technology in an era of massive change: It’s time we started filling up with photons instead of inefficient ethanol.
Please tell our elected officials that it’s time to convert some ethanol growing areas to solar, and make it easy for farmers to host – and benefit from – the power of the sun.
Send your message to elected officials here
Thanks for making the time.
– Angela Bischoff, Director, Ontario Clean Air Alliance
p.s. Please share our X tweet, our FB post, and our Bluesky post. Thanks
About the Ontario Clean Air Alliance – The Ontario Clean Air Alliance led the successful campaign to phase-out Ontario’s five dirty coal-fired power plants. We are now working to move Ontario to a zero-carbon electricity grid by 2035 or sooner, and lower electricity bills, through an integrated combination of energy efficiency and demand management, cost-effective Made-in-Canada renewable energy, and energy storage.
For more on the Ontario Clean Air Alliance and its citizen advocacy work, click on – https://www.cleanairalliance.org/
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