Unless a solar plant is built in a completely uninhabited place, could existing allocations / permits for local power distribution be reused to build a larger power line? I mean, there should already be a power distribution grid there, maybe just not powerful enough.

I suspect a lot of that is what we've been building in the last 10 years, but that the low-hanging fruit is taken. Some next-level fruit is solar shade structures over parking lots at existing retail and office sites.

Big wind projects have had issues reaching viability due to insufficiency of the transmission grid. T. Boone Pickens and the Texas Panhandle comes to mind.

Agrivoltaics.

1. https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2022/growing-plants-power-...

The thing about solar is this also includes distributed rooftop solar, which is probably easier to permit than one massive solar facility.

Absolutely! And more people should have it (no matter what the IOUs are convincing the CPUC to do). But particularly for cities, there's too much demand relative to rooftop to reach self-sufficiency this way.