We only have so much roof area, but we have almost no shortage of non-roof solar farm area.
Obviously every country is different — my country, the UK, much worse annual average light, and higher population density, but the point still applies. Almost every nation can do this without worrying about land use.
The US consumes nearly 29000 TWh of primary energy per year, of which about 3700 TWh ends up as usable electricity:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Ene...
(1 "quad", quadrillion BTU, is 293 TWh.)
The other is that you're estimating the energy of the sunlight that falls on 77.5e6 m^2 rather than the achievable electrical generation. The most efficient terrestrial solar panels are just a little above 20%.
I suppose if you want to just cover totally barren places like the Sahara with solar panels that would be OK, but there's political and engineering problems with that (transmitting power long-distance incurs losses, and getting power across the Mediterranean wouldn't be easy).
I’m all for renewable energy but I don’t want huge solar plants everywhere either.
No panels visible here, but they are marching towards sacred ground: https://goo.gl/maps/8kagR6UNXXG2
This doesn’t look like a commercial solar farm also it’s a pretty small installation which looks private.
Solar farms will have fences, battery storage, support structures, access roads and essentially everything any industrial installation needs.
They won’t be pretty and you need to be really up there to advocate for taking even more space away from the public.
They've got large coal dumping grounds. They usually have a freight train station that had coal dumped all over it, so everything within 10 meters of it died. They just let all of this sit in open air usually, plus there's the massive amount of smoke, so you can smell them from kilometers away even when there is wind (and let's just not discuss when there isn't, just visit Beijing).
But commercial scale solar farms are fucking ugly they take spaces away from people and advocating for more of them at the expense of green spaces is terribly short sighted.
Put solar everywhere we already have ugly box buildings and roads don’t take up even more shared spaces some of them due to current laws are written can even be nature reserves because we’re green after all.
But solar takes up a huge amount of space, it's worth admitting it.
IMHO this coal plant in the distance is easier on the eyes: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Getty...