There was a recent publication that modeled combined agriculture and solar photovoltaic farms, and found that less than 1% of current cropland would be needed to supply current world demand for energy:
And the rate of converting agricultural land to other uses is about 1% per decade, at least here in the US, so it's a tiny amount of land.
The stable income for farmers is also a big win, too. Economically, this all makes sense. We just need execution, and education about the tradeoffs for something like this.
What is the economic and environmental impact of manufacturing and installing that number of solar panels? And the biggest issues has always been getting the energy from where it is harvested, to where the demand is.
Both the economic and environmental impacts would be massively beneficial. If this idea sounds difficult because it sounds big, remember that we are already supplying global energy needs, just with far worse and older technology that is aging and needs to be replaced with new units on a regular time scale.
Solar is one of the cheapest possible energy sources and getting cheaper every year. Farmers across the midwest are already raking in profits merely for leasing the land for solar projects that others own; if farmers finance and install on their own the economic benefits to them and to the rest of society would be massive, especially compared to business-as-usual natural gas and goal.
Solar is also one of the cleanest in nearly every sense; in terms of amount of solar panels we'd need to scale up production, but recycling is starting to go full boar, and even without any recycling the environmental impacts of a kWh of solar are
Farms typically have fairly hefty connections to the grid because of high peak usage, but clearly there could be some contention that could be solved with greater transmission deployments or that the market could solve by pricing the connection fees.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-47803-3
And the rate of converting agricultural land to other uses is about 1% per decade, at least here in the US, so it's a tiny amount of land.
The stable income for farmers is also a big win, too. Economically, this all makes sense. We just need execution, and education about the tradeoffs for something like this.