Iowa Has Room for All Renewables - Solar, Wind and Ethanol

by Geoff Cooper (Renewable Fuels Association/The Gazette) ... Renewable liquid fuels and renewable electricity are highly complementary ways to reduce America’s carbon footprint. We can have clean renewable energy from solar and wind, as the authors want, and still take advantage of the greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions that come from using more ethanol in our transportation fuels.

Leading federal and state government agencies like the U.S. Department of Energy, California Air Resources Board, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have all recognized the environmental benefits of ethanol in reducing both tailpipe pollution and GHG emissions.

In fact, these agencies have recognized that grain-based ethanol reduces GHG emissions by 35 to 50 percent compared to gasoline. Some ethanol being produced today in Iowa reduces GHG emissions by nearly 80 percent, according to analysis by California regulators. Why wouldn’t we want to combine ethanol’s environmental benefits with those of the renewable power sector?

Should we seriously believe that with “creative taxation or tax abatements” the entire clean electricity industry would rush to bulldoze Iowa cornfields for solar and wind projects? Where are those renewable energy companies today? Is it really millions of acres of corn that are holding back progress? Absolutely not.

We’ve long heard the oil and gas lobby argue against ethanol. That’s understandable, since ethanol reduces demand for traditional fossil fuels and helps hold down the price of gasoline by 22 cents per gallon while also reducing our dependence on foreign oil. But when academics start asking what ethanol has done for rural Iowa, we’ve officially entered the Twilight Zone. READ MORE