Generally the worst case scenarios for covering all our energy needs with renewables end up with using around 1% of a country's land area. Which is already a sm

Generally the worst case scenarios for covering all our energy needs with renewables end up with using around 1% of a country's land area. Which is already a small fraction of the land we use for farms. But compared to the worst case scenario there are many reasons to think it will be far less: solar power and farms can use the same land in a synergistic way. It's called agrovoltaics. Solar can cover water reservoirs and canals which reduces water evaporation. Commercial rooftops and parking lots can also be covered. In practice wind power occupies a fraction of the land it does on paper, and can often be placed in between farm fields. And then there's geothermal which could cut land area use as well, especially for winter demand if you build district heating. Off-shore wind is growing rapidly. Even floating off-shore is gaining traction. These could eventually be co-located with the growing of seaweed for food, animal feed and bio-matter. The ocean out there is basically a desert, not much is growing there, and creating structures where things can grow will essentially act like a "greening" of the ocean, turning more of it into a CO2-sink. > How does space usage compare against nuclear plants? Obviously nuclear power plants use significantly less. How much depends if you include uranium mining, which generally happens in other countries. But nuclear power plants just isn't renewable, and their growth is fundamentally unsustainable. Thermal power plants also contribute to global warming by direct heating. It's not going to take more than a 10x increase in power production with thermal power plants before that becomes a significant concern. With renewables there is at least a theoretical path to full sustainability. All we have to do is to recycle the materials used to build them. The pinnacle of solar power sustainability is projects like the one to build huge solar power plants in Morocco and transfer the power to UK. You absorb solar energy from a place that has too much of it, and plenty of arid land, providing shade and cooling for a significant area where you could then potentially do agrovoltaics to grow food. Win-win. Not that I oppose nuclear. We should build what we can, as long as it's economically feasible. It's just that it gets way more attention online than it deserves. It's just not going to be as important as people think.