But why don’t we just build them in cities and parking lots especially since they want them within 10 miles of communities? I understand cost but this makes sense to just put them into cities and use the unused land to expand or use for farms and other things vs wasting land to build only solar farms.
Those are fair points but why not use that land to expand cities and homes, especially with the population continuing to grow we will need places to house people and using the land to build only solar farms will eventually have to be either moved when things expand or have to be skipped over and move communities further from natural resources where most cities are built close by already. I don’t think solar will be the 1 technology every region should use to solve the power problem but for sunny desert areas like Nevada, Arizona, Texas etc solar is good. Northern states could other technologies for power generation not just focusing on solar in the end.
The US west (and south-west in particular) has a serious problem with water as it is. Adding more population to that land is probably going to be a bad idea. We have plenty of room to expand more cities. Cities are more efficient uses of land. We don’t need to push people out to the middle of nowhere yet.