Giant Solar Power Farms: Are they a Good Idea?

Today, Green Wombat announced plans for the world’s largest solar power farm to be build in California.

Stealth Bay Area solar startup OptiSolar has quietly revealed plans to build the world’s largest photovoltaic solar farm on the central California coast — a $1 billion, 550-megawatt monster that would be nearly 40 times as large as the biggest such power plant operating today.

This is an interesting concept. Although we do need to be putting more money into renewable energy sources, to me, this farm plan seems a bit wasteful. There might be better ways to do this. Says one of the commenters:

…there should definitely be much more done to promote it at home because:

a) We have plenty of unused “land” on our roofs.

b) We don’t need to pay for unnecessary service of long distance transmission. (Something the big power companies are scrambling not to lose out on. They are the main opponents to microgeneration.)

c) We won’t have to suffer the considerable efficiency losses of that transmission. (The efficiency gains of this approach outweigh the gains of the economies of scale of building a large plant. It just requires more personal initiative.)

For reference, you can see information about the other large solar projects at EcoWorldly.

What do you think about a huge solar-powered farm like this?