Better energy density will also help locate solar power closer to where it will be used, like on top of buildings in the city rather than in a large plant out in the middle of nowhere, thus saving on transmission costs.
Finally, IMO photovoltaic pavement is probably going nowhere.
> Sheep grazing under solar panels at farms in NSW's Central West have produced better wool and more of it in the four years since the projects began, according to growers.
> Local graziers have labelled the set-up a "complete win-win", with the sheep helping to keep grass and weeds down so as not to obscure the panels.
This is not something that works so well with open cut coal and down wind from city supplying coal burning power stations.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
In fact, sharing improves efficiency of the panels, cuts water loss, and often increases yield.
When it is an issue there are countless solutions from sharing with livestock (already done in some areas) to providing partial shade for non energy crops like lettuce or capcicum that increase yield to covering parking.
For reference, there are about 2.5 billion parking spaces in the usa which take 20-50m^2 each, very little of which is more than three stories deep. This is room for between 1 and 5 TW of net (ie. averaged over the year including nights) capacity or roughly the USA's entire energy consumption. You could also replace a small fraction (about 5%) of corn used for ethanol (not the total corn) and get a similar result.
"Often" != "Always". Therefore you also agree that solar still competes for land use with crops.
Furthermore, land that has already been allocated to grid scale solar has already been taken away from possible crop use. Sometimes it's not arable land, but that isn't always the case, therefore solar is still ostensibly taking up land that could be used for crops.
Finally, I even disagree that somebody knew that solar and farming could use the same land. Someone had an idea that maybe they could coexist, then ran an experiment that succeeded. They certainly didn't know the outcome beforehand.
No. It just means that some places are better than others.
Since there is overwhelmingly more crop and pasture land than could ever be needed to satisfy power needs, solar may be placed exactly and only where it does the most good.
It has been known for centuries that most plants benefit from partial shade. It is an exceedingly tiny step of logic to go from "shade" to "shade provided by solar panels". In the past, providing shade just cost money. Now it yields direct revenue, year-round.
Again, "most plants" does not necessarily include "crops", most of which have been selectively bred over millennia while grown under full sun. The step is not from "plants do well under shade" to "plants do well under solar panels", it's to "crops we've never grown in partial shade might actually do better in partial shade too".
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
I'd assume coal uses much more land in absolute terms, since it's what 50% of global electricity vs 3-5% for solar at the moment.
Solar farms are often sited, stupidly, in deserts, not because it is a good idea, but because ignorant investors think it is a good idea.
Perhaps indulge our ignorance about deserts for a moment?
Siting panels on water and on farmland reduces operating temperature. Mounting vertically, in fence-rows, keeps off dust, collects more during morning and afternoon demand peaks, aids convective cooling, and protects crops from harshest afternoon sun.
But in reality, land use has never been a problem for Solar. It's great that lots of people are working on the issue and improving it. Just as lots of people are working on making them cheaper, or more environmentally friendly or easier to finance or a thousand other metrics.
But none of those were ever fundamental problems with the tech. Their own source of data about the 'problem' puts Ground-based PV at about the same land use as Coal.
They also missed out 'floatovoltaics' (PV on water) and building integrated PV as well as solar PV as a paving solution. Probably all of which are likely to be bigger than ground mount PV, given the trend to bifacial panels.