> It's not economical to leave it idle during poor yield years.
Poor yield implies high prices. It is not economical for anything but to leave it idle. And, as you'd expect, when corn was expensive a few years ago many ethanol plants did shut down.
For a short while around 2010, following a massive glut of corn through the early 2000s, the US government was paying ethanol producers to produce when corn was otherwise too expensive to work economically in an effort to jumpstart the industry. But those days are long behind us.
Poor yield implies high prices. It is not economical for anything but to leave it idle. And, as you'd expect, when corn was expensive a few years ago many ethanol plants did shut down.
For a short while around 2010, following a massive glut of corn through the early 2000s, the US government was paying ethanol producers to produce when corn was otherwise too expensive to work economically in an effort to jumpstart the industry. But those days are long behind us.