The US wants to build solar farms on unused land.

www.theguardian.com

The US says it needs 22m acres for the solar energy transition – here’s what that looks like

But why don't we just build them in cities and parking lots especially since they want them within 10 miles of communities? I understand cost but this makes sense to just put them into cities and use the unused land to expand or use for farms and other things vs wasting land to build only solar farms.

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Frequently, parking lots here in Southern California are covered by solar panels now. Generates electricity, and provides shade. Several high schools in my area have done this in their parking lots.
Some thoughts.
Renting rooftop space can add to costs for commercial land. You want to use my roof? I'm going to charge you for it.
You can use municipal buildings, but cities are dense by definition, and solar needs lots of space.
Solar works best in certain regions. A panel sitting in southern cloudless AZ will generate a lot more energy than cloudy northern DC.
Unused land is often unused for a reason. It's not usable. We're using most of the best farmland in the US already. Sending water to deserts is wasteful.
Why not use this land for solar power?
- Could have some unforseen ecological impacts if we just cover large swaths of desert. They're still eco systems. Of course if the alternatives are fossil fuels then I'm sure it's a better option. But if we're putting this infrastructure in the middle of nowhere why not nuclear? What's worse for the desert eco system? Covering it with solar or the very very slim chance of a nuclear accident? If it's far from any populated areas nuclear seems like the obvious best option.
  
  Could have some unforseen ecological impacts if we just cover large swaths of desert.
  Every decision ever made has a potential for unforseen consequences. You do what you can with what you know though.
  I'm a huge fan of nuclear power. Liberals have well and truly screwed us all by taking a strong stance against it.
  
  I feel like solar is a lot quicker to set up then nuclear and harder to shut down if political rivals gain power. I'm a big fan of both so either is a win in my book but I'm hoping as well nuclear gains more traction eventually.
  A small silver lining; I think I read an article about how solar farms can foster its own biomes by adding vaste amount of shade. It doesn't make up for the loss but if it can be engineered to sequester more carbon and host fauna, it's not a net loss.
  Thinking about it, maybe we need to rethink our approach to solar farms and put the panels on post higher up and more evenly spaced to have a proper undergrowth
- Those are fair points but why not use that land to expand cities and homes, especially with the population continuing to grow we will need places to house people and using the land to build only solar farms will eventually have to be either moved when things expand or have to be skipped over and move communities further from natural resources where most cities are built close by already. I don't think solar will be the 1 technology every region should use to solve the power problem but for sunny desert areas like Nevada, Arizona, Texas etc solar is good. Northern states could other technologies for power generation not just focusing on solar in the end.
  
  The US west (and south-west in particular) has a serious problem with water as it is. Adding more population to that land is probably going to be a bad idea. We have plenty of room to expand more cities. Cities are more efficient uses of land. We don't need to push people out to the middle of nowhere yet.
Why not do both?
The answer to your question: This is just yet another extension of colonialism. They don't own that "unused land" and they know it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees more of the public realm than any other federal government agency, has outlined exactly how much of western America should be made available for solar panels and their associated cables and transformers – 22m acres.
This total, part of a new administration plan to accelerate solar energy in the US west, will give the US “maximum flexibility” to meet climate goals, the BLM said.
A smaller area of this available land, around 700,000 acres, will definitely need to be dotted with solar panels to meet a goal set by Joe Biden to have a 100% clean electricity grid by 2035.
The scale of this growth, however, has unsettled some residents who oppose solar farms in their communities or on farmland, as well as environmentalists who fret over the fate of species such as the desert tortoise as seemingly empty habitat is upended into a new, mirrored, reality.
Even if land is used for a solar project, though, it can still be utilized for some other agricultural uses and BLM said it would prefer development to take place within 10 miles of existing transmission lines, with exclusions for habitat and cultural reasons.
Green groups say a detente can be found between the desire to protect food-producing land and habitat for threatened species while also tackling a climate crisis that menaces both people and wildlife.
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