Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation; not all roofs are built to take extra load; and they don't have the same scale as using acres of flat ground.
I agree something seems unsatisfactory about the situation, but the reality of solar energy is getting the installation and supporting infrastructure costs as low as possible for large scale deployment.
If you want solar car parks, warehouse roofs, etc. there need to be feed-in tariffs to encourage building owners to do it.
Humans can't eat electricity though.
> Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation
This seems like the problem to solve. For example, can you make some kind of modular panels simple enough to install for the property owner to do it themselves?
Open dirt is valuable because you can actually use it for something -- buildings, parks, agriculture, nature, etc.
Buildings also tend to be situated near where electricity is used, reducing distribution costs. Especially if the alternative is to use the "open dirt" which is inexpensive, and correspondingly far away from population centers and requiring long-distance transmission.
The maintenance cost is the problem to be solved. What you want is the ability for any rando with some basic tools the median homeowner has in their garage to be able to do the whole install in less than an hour, and be able to take them off and put them back on again in a similar amount of time in the event that you have to e.g. replace the roof.
We nearly use all of it. The large majority of land in the continental US is used for agriculture and forestry. The land which is actually unused is in places like Nevada (the desert) and Alaska (permafrost). But there isn't really anything like that within a thousand miles of New York City. What is within a thousand miles of New York City is about 80% of the population of the US.
> The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff.
I see a lot of houses with solar panels on the roof, so evidently plenty of people think you're wrong, and as far as I'm aware they're not generally losing money. Expecting property owners to not do something in their financial interest -- pay money for solar panels, but less than they'd pay to the power company in the alternative -- seems like a weird thing to expect people to do.
Large-scale generators are going to have trouble competing with that because they not only have to pay for the land (which may be cheap but it isn't free), they also have to pass through the cost to cover the distribution grid, whereas the homeowner only has to cover the difference in the installation costs between installing them on a roof and installing them on the ground, and then consumes the power themselves.
And since this is clearly not only going to happen but already is happening, it makes sense to optimize the cost by making them easier to install.
Open space ("dirt") is potentially useful for tons of other uses, no point in wasting it on panels that can go on the roof.
There is a lot of unused open space way out far from cities. Electricity suffers from transmission losses, the more distance the more loss.
The ideal place to put that panel is on my roof which is just a few dozen feet from where it's going to be consumed. That'll be a lot more efficient than having it 500 miles away in the desert.
Roof solar uses a lot more labour, partly because roofs are inaccessible and need to seal, but also because roofs are smaller than fields.
A typical home solar install might take 3 guys a day to do - for maybe 6 kilowatts.
A typical field install can probably install 60 kilowatts with the same 3 guys in a day.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_03.html
You're confusing the line item called "transmission" with the concept that the electric utility's entire operations expense is in service of operating the power grid and all of that gets included in the price per kWh whenever you buy power through the grid.
A property owner who is installing their own solar and consuming the output themselves can avoid the other 56% of those costs. Which is well worth a one-time labor cost.
Comparing the efficiency of photosynthesis and photovoltaics is meaningless because they don't yield the same product.
In the real world, farm power is required for heavy equipment, battery banks, powering cell phone repeating towers on leased out land and entire paddocks are dedicated to mounting panels.
These can be ground panels (saves on mounting) or high mounts (to allow for tilt and track | animals to graze underneath)
See, for example: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
It's upsetting watching millions of acres of fertile land becoming essentially salted with heavy metals.
What is really effective at energy conversion is solar to thermal. We're talking 70% efficient, zero heavy metals. If we were to put panels on buildings, it's a crying shame that they are not zero heavy metal, vastly more efficient solar thermal.
Have you visited the rust belt? When cars reach EOL, they often don't get "taken away".
Difficult to accept that people don't understand that bringing heavy metals up and putting them everywhere will ultimately result in leaching into groundwater and contamination of food and water.
Being able to deploy solar onto their land basically gives farmers a decoupled revenue stream (obviously there is -some- correlation between solar production and good/bad harvests) that doesn't necessarily tax them the same way doing crop diversity might.
Now, obviously we might wish to avoid mono-cultures for other reasons, but I think anything that can help farmers manage their risks without just resorting to more consolidation is probably a good thing as well.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=walmart+solar+fires&t=fpas&iar=new...
All the solar farms were presented as having a functional life of 25-30 years. Instead it's turning into more like 4-8, because the area gets monster thunderstorms that produce hail which wrecks the solar panels.
But that's not the full problem. The solar panels are then leaching a lot of heavy metals and chemicals. So much so that the recovered land from some of the destroyed solar panel farms is not currently suitable for farming and groundwater in the area is becoming contaminated.
They are now however building some enclosed retractable roof type buildings to house panels but protect them from hail.