Converting the waste stream from agrivoltaics into biofuels appears to be the best option: reduced land for "energy" crops, increased output for food crops, and biofuel to replace petroleum.
We have gas stations everywhere because individuals need that kind of convenience to operate comfortably. BEVs have the same infrastructure in that every outlet is a charging station. While the barrier to entry for hydrogen is too high for personal vehicles, the logistic hub nature of heavy transport would be much easier to convert, using hydrogen storage/filling stations at strategic location to support hydrogen powered semi-trucks, local delivery trucks, busses, etc.
The fact that plants already will produce hydrocarbons for us without much over sight only makes things easier.
Now that being said, our current natural gas infrastructure can accommodate something like 10% hydrogen gas, so it would be great if we could store extra solar electricity within our own pipelines by generating hydrogen gas, back feeding it into the lines, and then deplete it later, with a molecular sieve to pull out hydrogen gas alone, or burn it with the methane.
ICE engines running on biofuel are about as efficient as they are going to get, whereas hydrogen power is a fairly immature technology and has a lot of potential efficiency gains as the technology matures.
I think biofuel from waste products will still be useful for certain applications, for instance in medium and long haul aviation, where the energy density of hydrogen would pose a significant challenge. But biofuels are just not scalable to the levels required for global demand vs land requirements. Using biofuels just for aviation would require cultivating land the size of Texas, California, and Florida. [0][1][2] It is just not feasible to scale as a primary fuel in a fossil fueless future. Hydrogen can scale with electrical capacity, which can come from nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, etc.
[0] back of the napkin math/conversions based on 2 and 3
[1] https://its.ucdavis.edu/blog-post/making-policy-in-the-absen...
[2] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/USA/jet_fuel_consumption/
Would you rather we burn grass and dead standing wood in natural environments to curtail wildfires, or would you rather it was used to make clean energy that is carbon negative? Yes carbon negative. You put carbon back into the ground through the use of biochar, where it is stable for thousands of years, and actually improves the soil.
Anaerobic digestion of all of your household waste (including feces) is also possible for production of all of your stove and heating gas.
Internal combustion engines aren't at their end of technology cycle. You should probably look into supercritical CO2 closed loop turbines if you think that we aren't still innovating. Regardless, by using an internal combustion engines, or an external combustion engine (Stirling engine, or modern steam engine) instead of a furnace, one can produce heat and power all in one unit from within your house or district (depending on how you want to scale things).
I love solar, I really do, as well as batteries. But you need to use everything at your disposal if you want to get away from petroleum.
Meanwhile, I’m pretty excited about this project to make it cheap and easy to convert solar power to liquid fuel. Starting with carbon-neutral natural gas.