This is literally the most important factor to consider as it is a very scare resource in some markets - nevermind that this would be a significant driver of cost for solar, as it requires massive amounts of land (and taxes). This is true for solar, wind, etc be built.
> I don't understand. Why is it that in every single discussion about power- and in particular, solar power- is the cost of land omitted ?
You are incorrect that land costs are omitted; in fact I don't recall any sort of cost comparison that has ever omitted land costs, whether it's from Lazard or NREL or anywhere else. It's part of the CapEx, or as rent, or however it's modeled. NREL in particular looks at overall costs on completed and built systems. Further, the developers building these things know the land costs very well.
Can you point to a discussion or paper where land cost was not included? If it's still an open discussion I'd love to add the high quality solar-is-cheapest studies that all include land costs.
And as for this particular study:
First, doesn't omit the cost of land. Secondly land is only the most important resource in very very few markets. Razing skyscrapers in Manhattan would be a bad idea. Instead of farming crops or the sun in Manhattan, it's done elsewhere and shipped in.
Residential or industrial rooftops are perfect examples. Heck, sound barriers along freeways etc are now even profitable
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
The UK also has a huge amount of roof-top PV potential, outside the very dense city cores, plus enough golf course space to cover all our PV needs and some I think.
Spain and France and Italy are also doing well with PV and are nowhere near done.
Land on Earth is in fact not a scarce resource.
I don’t doubt that the costs are considerable but if we’re going to go down that path we need to make sure it’s applied across the board here and I imagine the gap is not as bad as you’re implying. I’m going off my gut though so I could be entirely wrong.
I think most major solar projects include land and infrastructure so only comparing the costs of the panels is like comparing hydro only based on operating the dam, not building it.
Fossil the way we're running it now is only priced out based on burning it not dealing with its externalities either.
Comparing solar cells without other direct costs is not sufficient for decision making.
The answer to this problem is more precise and complete comparisons, not fewer.
Our point is that they aren't. Find a single study the fossil fuel industry funds, hell even accepts, that includes the longterm environmental and health costs. They’ll never agree it’s accurate. This ripples out to their proponents.
We have a US president touting “clean coal” in 2025. What else is there to say?
> Our Nation’s beautiful clean coal resources will be critical to meeting the rise in electricity demand due to the resurgence of domestic manufacturing and the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
Take all that land that's currently used for fossil fuels, and replace its use with solar, and you're replacing pretty much 100% of the world's total energy demand, not just fossil fuel demand. (I need to find that citation again...)
This is even more important for solar eclipses: unlike normal sunrise and sunset which are gradual, the ramp in a solar eclipse is very steep, so the grid operator has to have enough reserve prepared in advance and ready to absorb the sudden decrease (and increase) in solar generation.
I would regard that as a huge improvement in use from areas that are otherwise often fairly sterile from a biodiversity point of view, and only get used by a fraction of the population.
What is the 'cost' of those courses, vs PV, vs horrible climate change?
But the point remains that very significant PV can be provided on already-in-use land from homes and warehouses to reservoirs and farm land agrivoltaics.
The solar discussed is massive investments into solar farm production.
To your point, sure you can do "remote" - you still have to get a lot of power transmission lines to remote locations, and yes you still have to buy the land. Its not a 0 cost investment. But that's what the accounting looks like when discussing this topic.
Its sloppy
Separate reports in the last couple of days suggest that both Norway and Germany could get ~25% of their total solar power from viable rooftop spaces, IIRC.
And indeed one very positive feature of solar is that it IS safe to deploy AT load/demand centres, very much reducing costs and losses in the last 'distribution' mile.
Solar also works when there is no grid locally, which is useful from rural UK to Africa.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/10/03/rooftop-solar-could-g...
[2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/rooftop-solar-housing-b...
However, not every single discussion does omit it. For example, we were discussing this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487268 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487197, where my calculation was that even in solar-unfavorable places like the northern extreme of Germany, the cost of land barely reaches the same order of magnitude as the cost of the solar modules, even at today's record-low module prices. US$72 million of the US$200 million of the estimate mentioned above was the modules themselves, but today that would be closer to US$15 million.
The atom of truth in your confused assertion is that solar farms do take up enormous amounts of land compared to other kinds of power plants. But, at current human energy consumption levels, it's still only a tiny amount of overall land.
I'm assuming from your past submission history that you're in the US, because you mostly only post US politics stuff. The US generates about 4200 TWh electric per year, which is 480 gigawatts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...). Under the 2000kWh/year/kWp conditions prevailing in the Californian Mojave Desert, parts of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, according to https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali..., this would require about 2.1 terawatts (peak) of solar panels. A square meter of 22%-efficient solar panel produces 220 watts, peak, so this is about 9600 square kilometers, a 110-kilometer-diameter circle. (Although, if you don't leave spaces between the panels, you have to make them horizontal so they don't shade each other; in practice people set them further apart to use more land but less panels.)
How big is that?
It's almost 0.1% of the US, not counting the space between the panels. It's a little over twice the diameter of the VLA radio telescope in western New Mexico, a facility you might remember from the movie Contact. It's slightly larger than White Sands Missile Range (8300km²). It's 15 times the size of Lake Mead, which was created by Hoover Dam to generate electricity. It's about two thirds the size of California's Death Valley National Park (13'793km²). It would take up one eighth of the Navajo Reservation.
Almost everywhere in the US has at least half that much sunlight. Suppose you wanted to site the panels near Springport, Michigan, for some reason. You only have 1200 kWh/year/kWp there, so you need 16000km². The panels would cover a ten-county area centered on Jackson County; they would reach Lansing, and might reach from Ann Arbor to Kalamazoo.
In real life, it wouldn't be a good idea to put it all in one place like that, both because it's fragile and because it creates higher transmission-line losses; it's better to put the panels closer to where they're used, which implies spreading them apart. So probably 0.2% of every state. In an average-sized state like Iowa (145'746km²) it might be 300km², 20% of the size of an average-sized county like Hamilton County. To power the whole state.
But try to keep perspective on the total amount of land we're talking about here: White Sands Missile Range, two thirds of Death Valley, or a small part of the Navajo Reservation to power the whole country.
Which is just about the fraction of the US covered by golf courses.
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/10/solar-panels-half-th...
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-first-...
its simple
*Why is the cost of land ommitted ? *
A link to "rooftops" is not an answer when its primary use case is a ROI that doesn't work out unless its measured in decades.
Sloppy accounting.
My initial answer was literally going to be a Billy Madison quote. Specifically, the reply to Principal Max Anderson to Billy's rambling answer. But that's offensive, so i will just state:
you can do better!
https://www.agweb.com/news/business/4-500-acre-plus-signing-...
I suspect not. You seem to be assuming the land the solar sits on can't be put to other uses as well. Clearly this is not true in urban settings. There is usually a building sitting under the solar panels, doing whatever it did before.
But it turns out it's not true even in agricultural settings. You can still use pasture under solar panels for grazing. In fact, on marginal land the solar panels actually increase the output of grazing, because the shading increases water retention.
That's putting aside what has already been pointed out to you repeatedly: a solar panel costs around $100/m2. Agricultural land costs around $1/m2. The cost of the land is almost a rounding error.