Great points

Some (very rough) numbers to give scale here:

Corn in the US covered ~90 million acres in 2024. Something like 40% of that gets turned into ethanol IIRC.

Based on solar capacity figures around ~200GW, the surface area of the PV panels themselves (not the installation) are about 250-300k acres.

Both solar and bio-ethanol render an energy output on the order of 250-350TWh/year. Broadly similar levels of energy, but using a tiny fraction of the land area and chemicals and industrial pollution for the former.