The way it works these days in general- a utility needs to meet a renewable standard or something similar and a hedge fund or private equity outfit puts a pencil to a project and, wham bam, it happens. That is now increasingly an economically viable model even without subsidies or portfolio standards.
On the positive side, we lose hundreds of thousands of acres a year to sprawl, and at least solar sites aren't permanently disturbed to a large extent. After a 20-30 year life cycle for a project with bees and butterflies dancing under them, or sheep grazing, the sites can be returned to agricultural use if that's where things stand. That, as opposed to big box sites covered with asphalt, subdiivisions with the topsoil scraped off, etc.
A lot of communities (and particularly farmers) are balking. I don't know how anybody can really object to a solar field (as opposed to a wind farm) unless it is across the road from their house, but as I've learned from serving on a plan commission, somebody will object to anything because they can.
Anyway, from a land use point of view, wonderful place to put solar installations is in urban areas- particularly down on their heels rust belt places with big brownfield sites, dying malls etc. I would think that people there would be extremely happy to have those huge additions to their shrinking tax bases if rural areas don't want it.
There are some technical considerations that I'm not fully knowledgable to answer. In the current (not really a) model, they just want cheap land- although they can pay almost anything and have it be a near rounding error over the life cycle of the project. But in particular, they want proximity to high voltage lines to feed wholesale power into the grid.
Inside an existing city, voltage is already stepped down and the high voltage lines just run to substations on the perimeter. Building high voltage lines is expensive, and a lot harder to pull off in an established urban area.
So you're probably looking at a modified mini-grid system where most of that power is consumed locally- which still counts, it just needs to be accounted for differently than in the current (not really a) system.
And of course even though they're a little more expensive than grid scale projects on a KWh basis, dedicated systems for large users like schools, large hospitals, universities are a grand slam every day. You get to buy your own power at the wholesale price.
Of course the best part of our vast solar endowment is in the West and Southwest, where all you really need to do is fence out the Bundys' free range mutt cattle.
