I am glad you've moved from your previous view of solar needing to be done all in one big lump of area. The solution is to distribute it across all land and buildings around the places we live and work.
The fundamental reason I argue always for solar is that the sun is the only actual source of energy.
You were once a bank manager, so maybe it helps to analyse the energy problem by financial analogy:
We might say that the sun is nature's money issuer, and the currency of nature is called energy, and we accept that there is no energy issuer on Earth, it all comes from the sun. But to keep thinking of energy as money, lets call it "e-money". The e-money received on Earth from the sun goes into the creation process of everything we know, creating matter by Einsteins famous formula E=MC^2.
That equation gives us the cost of all matter, in terms of e-money, or energy.
When we calculate that sum for any matter, we quickly get to astronomical numbers, with only a few grams of matter.
Nature has invested an awful lot of e-money to create everything we know.
When we process any of this matter of any kind, to remove what we can of the e-money that went into creating it, back out again, we find we can only extract a tiny fraction of the e-money that created it. Even in the case of nuclear processing, it is still only a very small fraction of what was invested to create it, since only a small proportion of the material can be reacted. The remainder is toxic pollution. This is the case for all fuels, everything we try to process to extract e-money back out.
We might see this then as something like buying and selling secondhand goods. Nature created the new goods which cost a very large sum of e-money, and donated them to Earth. Then we come along, take those expensive goods, usually in exchange for nothing given to Earth, and process them for whatever e-money we can wring back out of them, and discard whatever is left (Pollution).
Yet we never include any of this in our calculations of energy efficiency. What would be the point? It always looks incredibly bad, because it is. We are really good at ignoring and cancelling things that don't suit our agendas.
But what we are seeing, millions of species of life, all forms of energy, disappearing, are all direct results of this energy deficit which we have built on our planet.
As long as we keep building that deficit, we continue to choke all life to extinction, including us, because we depend on that energy in our environment, just like all other living things.
Cancer, covid, diabetes, war, racism, colonialism, divisionism, all of those, and pretty much everything and anything bad we can shake a stick at, are down to us extracting ever more e-money from Earth.
Compare with solar: We create interfaces to receive e-money from the sun, direct, so there is no process of destruction whatsoever, after an initial outlay to create the interface.
Everything we do with that e-money, received direct from the sun is added to Earth. Every material, every fuel, and even food, are all things added to Earth, no destruction involved.
Using solar, we are assisting nature, to add value to Earth in pretty much the same way as she does, by creating it all from e-money direct from the sun.
This is the only way we can pay back down the e-money debt we owe to our planet. There is no other way.
Until we start to do that in earnest, we are on a path to extinction.
Similar arguments exist for wind and wave, all are forms of stored energy, rather than energy direct from issuer, they are all forms of second hand energy, except solar.
At some point money issuers will fall into line with the issue of solar energy from the sun that we put to use.
Until then, we have to put up with doing everything but solar, driven by human money issuer's wishes to avoid complying with nature at all costs, it seems to me.
A final question: a litmus test for whether or not it is worthwhile doing all of solar, wind, nuclear, wave, hydro, etc, etc:
If you were in the position of having some solar-hydrogen infrastructure in place, enough to be receiving income from it such that some of that income could be redirected back into futher scaling up the infrastructure, but not yet enough to meet all demands, what would you choose to do; oil, nuclear, wind, waves, or just scale up the solar?
It think the answer to that question is pretty much a no-brainer. With any kind of materials-from-sunlight creation, there comes free income. Scaling that up takes out all questions of efficiency, even e-money efficiency, it no longer applies, if solar capacity can be expanded, and maintained forever, for free, funded by direct e-money issued by the sun, no extraction required, only valuable posiitive product added to Earth.
We are already just about at this stage. Hydrogen facilities are going into existing solar farms as we write, and those will make the changes we need to see.
So I can't see nuclear lasting much longer, and to be honest, I thank god / nature for that. We will all breathe a sigh of relief when we can finally let it go, it seems to me, maybe even you too... :)
