"On Tuesday they announced an agreement that could result in construction of a massive, 4,500-acre solar generating station in Southern California. This comes to around seven square miles, with a perimeter of nearly 30 miles."
That seems like a lot of land to generate 500MW while the sun's up.
There's a lot of virtually useless land in the Southwest that could be profitably put to work in this manner. It does eat up a lot of real estate for these type installations but there's plenty of it to go around and it has plenty of sunshine. It's called desert.
I can't wait for the greens to start their objections though. Surely there's some toad or lizard that will be affected by all those solar power arrays.