The amount of solar panels needed for a house (or their share, in some solar farm) is miniscule. It's 4-7 panels. If we want to store excess for night, maybe 10. The batteries fairly small (using lithium, a sufficient battery could hang on the wall. Maybe two tesla power walls would do it). The waste isn't that bad (nowhere near the amount of waste people create yearly in plastic or other landfill garbage).

It's totally doable in first world countries. And it would go a long way in developing countries too, for the same reason cell phones gained popularity faster than landlines, because they require less infrastructure.

Compared to coal, give me batteries any day! And we don't really yet know the full effects of all this cheap natural we're getting through fracking. Though I'm sure fracking is probably better than coal mining, we'll have to wait to see.

And of course you can't expect every country to go fully solar/wind. What you need are integrated, continent wide power grids and alternative energy storage mechanisms like molten sands etc.