The typical 1,000 megawatt coal or nuclear plant might sit on a few acres. To generate the same amount of electricity with renewables would require 60,000 acres for a utility-scale wind farm, or about 11,000 acres of photovoltaic cells capturing the sun's light. Digging up more earth to make more solar panels is not a good path. Coal provides half our electricity today. Wind and solar provide less than 1 percent. Where to you plan on getting the rest of your material from? The solar panel industry will sink under the weight of its own trash. Some governments may even regulate it as hazardous waist.
The coal mine and uranium mines to get fuel for those plants take up a bit of space, usually more than a few acres, however, yes they take up overall less area than solar would. That said, you can install solar on roofs, so dual using the roof. We have a LOT of roof space in the USA. And wind farms can be built within farm land that is still useable for farmland. Interestingly a couple of depleted coal mines are being converted into solar industrial arrays. And that is the important part, the coal depletes and once burned to make energy it is gone forever (well give or take several million years). If the fuel for solar goes out, we have more serious problems then worrying about electricity. And as mentioned at least for silicon panels, they are 95% plus recyclable back into solar panels at the end of their useful life, so not a lot of waste. And they are working on improving that towards 100% without ruining the efficiency. Silicone solar panels are mostly aluminum frame with glass covering a different form of silicon.
As an interesting side note, while we are basically at around 25% efficiency at the moment, in the labs they have panels that are the equivalent of over 100% efficient. Note the word equivalent, as they are multi-layer technology, each layer only does 15-25%, but with four or five layers they can combined come in over 100% of potential solar energy, namely because each is using a different part of the spectrum. Technically it is 100% plus of current solar technology.
Oh and currently wind makes up 9.2% of electricity and solar 2.8% of USA electricity and both 9.8% of global energy (as of Feb 2022 based on 2021 data)
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