- we can’t rely on intermittent power source without grid scale batteries (which we don’t cheaply have)
- fossil fuel land use is exaggerated since it is double counted (e.g. you might drill for oil on a farmed field) and since it can be cheap, remote land. Solar land use is usually single purpose and near the users (so typically more expensive/useful land).
Singapore to Darwin is about 2000 miles. For reference, that's comparable to Chicago to LA. That's at least an order of magnitude larger than what I'm used to thinking about for transmission.
It turns out that if you want to drive your transmission loss down, you need to run at (substantially) higher voltage. This is predominantly driven by resistive loss because your transmission wires aren't perfect conductors, as well as corona loss which scales with voltage.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110604181007/https://www.aep.c...
has some stats on stats on line losses. At 765 kV (this is 50x what you'd see on a local transmission line), with the best cited figure (circa 2007) of 0.5% loss per 100 miles, you'd see about 10% loss over 2k miles. That's not great, but it doesn't actually seem horrible -- if you're producing 2x the power you need anyways, then you're still delivering a huge surplus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Asia -- and sort by length.
(Of course, this doesn't account for last-mile delivery, or AC/DC conversion losses. But the limiting factor isn't the technology, at this point.)
And in the case of:
> - we can’t rely on intermittent power source without grid scale batteries (which we don’t cheaply have)
.. for domestic users, behind the meter storage is fast becoming compelling.
I had (with local subsidies) AUD $7,000 worth of panels installed earlier this year, and generate an average of 2.5 more power than I consume. A $10,000 battery system probably cover my domestic usage for all but the most rare run of cloudy days. That second figure's on a downward trend, too, especially as flow storage and other battery technologies start to benefit from the scale-up.
Depending on panel capacity and storage size, then yeah, you may find they align - but it's all a tradeoff. My point with those numbers is that for a reasonably small cost (compared to say the capex of a house build, which is the time these things should be installed) you can get very close to self-reliance in terms of electricity, at least at a residential scale, so we're not all held up by grid-scale storage systems. Commercial consumers of electricity tend to have predictable cycles, and therefore their baseload is much easier to manage.
https://www.google.com/maps/@28.4198071,-98.8400976,792a,35y...
Your first point seems to be an actual but manageable problem though.
Grazing animals probably wouldn't work very well.
Some grasses grow with partial light. With the right inter-panel spacing, could it be that a grazing animal might require more space, but not to an unreasonable degree? (I assume there are other considerations for the pasture...ease of finding the animals, moving them around, etc)
Or rather, too much sun for available water. Installing solar panels high enough that goats don't bump into them, and planting shade-tolerant arid plants, can absolutely support grazing.
There are also studies that show that solar panel above fields can help boost production of both: solar panel get cooled by the plant perspiration and the plant get cooled by the shade of the panel.
Goats climb anything.