When they talk about the W/square foot available for solar energy, they leave out the need for access to clean and maintain the panels.
This effectively reduces the power available in a given area. If you have 1 acre available, you can't use all of it for panels. You need to be able to get into the panel area to clean. This means aisles for humans.
Combine this with the low efficiency and it is very expensive per kwh.
I'm not anti-solar, or wind. I am for what makes sense. We can't rely on PV solar to the extent they say we can.
Solar thermal is an alternative to PV. Some greens are touting the advantages of solar thermal especially energy storage. I am not sure if solar thermal can scale as its advocates insist. Solar thermal technologies have been around for a long time but the technology is receiving renewed investor interest in the last few years. Perhaps someone with more expertise can comment on the economic viability of solar thermal as compared to PV for power generation.
Someting that I have always wondered about solar panel arrays- they are just as land intensive as say, a strip mine. Land covered by panels is not going to grow anything, and no wildlife is going to be using it, and there's going to be big infrastructure aspects too, plus local temperature changes. I read somewhere that it would take 100 acres of solar panels to produce the same energy output as one natural gas well footprint at 1 acre.
Yet solar is supposed to be minimal impact ?