The footprint of anything that stores enormous amounts of energy is enormous. (If you think it isn't - batteries, say - it's because you've ignored the socking great mine needed to extract the materials, the factories needed to make them, etc.). And we don't need it to be that near - we have pylons.

This seems to be one of the key indicators of green pseudoengineering - an obsession with avoiding transporting power. Pylons work. Really. If you can get large amounts of RELIABLE renewable power/storage, with low labour and machine costs, from a large amount of cheap land, land far away from people or crops or even trees, you do not have to worry about the rest. Worry about how to get those labour and machine costs down.