>>13134743i'm just sketching my line of thought here, i'm an engineering physics phd candidate in a renewable energies related topic.
electricity is produced by power plants. big power plants working on coal and nuclear need to be observed and maintained by a full staffed team of engineers. smaller power plants like wind turbines, solar farms and hydropower also need regular maintenance, safety observers (basically human backup if controller fails) and only benefits the energy grid if energy is acutely needed.
a personal anecdote: i have worked in a company that does maintenance of offshore wind turbines while i was on my masters degree. they had a team of ~20 people working on the sea for 8 weeks, living on a special boat and doing the basic repairs around a windpark in the north sea. they also were disassembling the nacelles and rotors of the towers and bring them back to the place where i worked. there the nacelles and rotors were placed in a big garage to be worked on and basically be completely overhauled. just the maintenance of that windpark required manpower of 150 employees. this is without the employees of the windpark operator.
on the other side, industrial farming is managing acres of land with 1 or 2 machines, that can be operated by a single human. for example agricultural aircraft, combine harvesters etc.
so i would say food production needs less man-hours.
if your intent behind this question is to argue for biomass energy, then you also need to factor in the damaging effects of monocultures, which will be a direct result of that. farmers would tend to only grow plants with the highest energy yield in terms of energy production
