Fundamentally renewable energy resources are relatively diffuse when compared to fossil or nuclear sources. That's the inherent nature of them and that being so, the physical footprint of any scheme to use them will, per unit of output, be larger than one based on fossil or nuclear sources.
That however isn't necessarily a problem since land as a whole isn't scarce. Scarce in Western Europe, in parts of China and in the north-eastern United States perhaps yes, but not scarce in most places.
The real problem that's making it unnecessarily expensive is that society, via politics and to lesser extent commercial arrangements, is trying to fight physics and that has no chance of ending well. There's a lot of things that can be done to do it economically but as a society we're choosing to not do them, instead doing it the hard and expensive way instead.
If it's to work then it's not a lot different to making coal work. We need to work with physics not against it. Indeed that was very much the key to making brown coal work in Victoria - it's a shockingly crap resource but there was a determination to make it work and so it did. Same applies to renewables, they can work if as a society we wan them to work.
First step is the wind and solar farms need to go in the right places, and it's not just about total production over time. It's about inverse correlations across the fleet so as to get consistent production overall. So it's about putting solar and wind farms in places with exposure to different weather and in particular where inverse correlations exist (and they certainly do exist in practice). Likewise it's about inversely correlated technologies of which solar and river hydro are the most obvious since the weather conditions that favour one are detrimental to the other, leading to greater consistency of overall production.
The next step is to align consumption with production. That doesn't mean eating dinner at 1pm and things like that but some loads can certainly be shifted. Eg storage water heating is dead simple technology, well proven more than a century ago, and was actually in widespread use until in 2010 our political masters decided they preferred gas.
That one in particular needs to be reversed with all haste, and also encouragement of sensible time shifting of other loads where practical. Eg battery charging, swimming pool filters and heaters, etc don't need to happen at a specific time as long as they do reliably get done.
Then there's a need for storage to go with it. Noting the two points above both reduce the requirement for storage, and they do substantially, but it still exists so we still do need storage and that means both batteries and pumped hydro, not one or the other but both. And in doing that the "kill two birds with the one stone" approach should always apply - sensible location of the batteries can avoid network upgrades that would otherwise be required, thus saving money.
Always remembering that it's a system and that brings me to another point - one of the biggest mistakes we're making is economic ideology insisting on pretending there's multiple systems when in truth there's only one. That alone is adding serious inefficiencies and costs when compared to having everyone working on one plan and, if there's a desire to have multiple owners, well just reach agreement on who does which part of that plan. It needs to operate as a single system however.
And finally, overheads. Technical efficiency alone won't provide a low cost supply if it comes with overheads and at present those are a killer. Hedging adds about 50% to the price of wholesale bulk electricity on a base load basis in SA and it's similar for other states. That's financial middlemen clipping the ticket, and it's a situation that only exists at all due to a market that's intentionally designed to produce volatility. A single monopoly utility wouldn't spend even one cent on that - hence as I've previously mentioned 46% of the total bill is for things that aren't the physical generation, transmission or distribution of electricity to consumers.
Using an analogy, suppose that we had no consistent road rules but that each car came with a book describing some rules the manufacturer wanted you to follow when driving, those rules being different for each make of car. Some say a green light means go, some say red means go. Some say a stop sign means you should stop, others say a stop sign means traffic on the cross street is going to stop for you. Some say 2P means a maximum 2 hours parking, others say that's a minimum stay. Some say a 40 sign means 40 meters per second is the minimum required speed, others say no it means 40 miles per hour, other say no it's actually in kilometres per hour and it's a maximum not a minimum. Etc. Meanwhile all the service stations refuse to tell you what the pump dispenses, leaving you to guess whether you just filled the tank with 98 RON petrol or whether you just filled it with AdBlue.
Now if we did that then we'd have constant chaos on the roads and, not unreasonably, there'd be a lot of people saying that cars don't seem too workable as a means of transport and that we ought go back to horses and carts, leaving engine driven transport to the railways alone.
That cars and other road vehicles work in practice is because it's treated as a single system. Doesn't matter what sort of vehicle or who made it, there's one set of rules as to how it's to be driven with those rules being designed so as to produce a workable system so long as everyone follows them. There's a requirement to hold a license to drive on a public road, obtaining which requires a competency test, and we have an assortment of other rules about paying attention, not being drunk and so on. Meanwhile the roads all interconnect with each other, they're named for identification with additional signage to remind drivers where those roads lead, the fuel pumps are labelled as to what they dispense, everything's clearly defined and we have active enforcement of compliance with all these requirements. End result is millions of privately owned vehicles, all driven by individual humans, actually does work well enough that the imperfections are tolerable.
Renewable energy is much the same. It can work so long as it's treated as a single system with everyone on the same page and that there aren't "missing links" which break it. It's workable if as a society we want it to work, indeed it does involve a lot of similar concepts. Put a chart of road traffic volume on one screen, and put a chart of electricity demand on another screen, and they look remarkably similar.
That centralised generation was simpler is so for the same reasons that railways are simpler. Only a few key bits of infrastructure and all under the control of one entity that can make sure its employees follow stated rules "or else" is inherently easier than a complex network with a huge number of participants. As cars have proven though, the latter can work so long as it's designed to work and there's a high level of compliance.
And yes, road transport has storage (car parks) it has demand management (drivers who don't need to travel during the peak tend to avoid doing so), it has transmission (highways), it has distribution (local roads), it's operated as a co-ordinated system (traffic signals) and so on. Quite a lot of similarities there but it's been made to work despite the underlying difficulties.
There's also the point that in the long term there's no choice. Regardless of where anyone stands on the climate issue, bottom line is non-renewable energy resources are just that, they're non-renewable and with continued use would eventually run out. Argue all you like about how long that would take, but ultimately they're finite and in the case of oil and gas current knowledge says they're
reasonably limited. Exactly how long they'll last is arguable, but they're reasonably limited resources and, key point, they've a myriad of important uses other than generating electricity.
Ultimately it's doable. It's a lot easier than making agriculture work and it's no harder than making road transport work but, as with both of those, it needs politics out of the way and competent people left to get on with it, the role of politics being as an overseer asking pertinent questions to ensure it's on track but not as chief doer.
Historically, that's how the existing grid came into being. In the Australian context Tasmania jumped in first, figuring cheap electricity would be economically advantageous to the state but being consciously aware that hydro resources remote from the population needed a centralised approach to make them workable. Victoria came next for the same basic reasons, brown coal also needed a large scale co-ordinated approach to make it workable in an economical manner. Both succeeded and in due course the other states went down the same track.
So it's all doable and as a few have noted in the media, it basically is a case of doing what worked historically. Doing whatever's necessary to make the available resources workable.
As for the visual impacts, well those exist but nothing will trump agriculture for that one and roads have had a pretty major impact too. I mean seriously, there's an awful lot of Australia where farms and roads are basically using 100% of the available land but I don't see too many protesting about that and calling for a shift to synthetic food and a ban on cars.