https://coloradomtn.edu/news/cmc-news/new-solar-array-and-ba...https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/sci-tech/mountaintop-solar-farm...
www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/birds-eye-view-of-the-solar-power-plant-and-lush-royalty-free-image/1338844539
www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/aerial-view-of-solar-power-station-royalty-free-image/1045649830
https://www.ecoportal.net/en/carpeting-mountains-with-solar-...
Just go look at it if you were looking for shocking images. Notice how suspiciously flat patches appear in the mountains just for the PVs and notice how panels often seem recessed below top of existing trees. The process of solar farm construction in such areas begins by clearing out existing life. That's how it's done. It doesn't go like, you just pick a dead land on map and giving out a free nice shed for local scorpions.
I mean, look at even East Coast of the US on Google Maps. Pick any areas just off a city and zoom in. There would be towns, farmlands, forests, mountains, or combinations thereof. If you do the same in the West Coast, you are more likely to hit such suitable flats that can host mega electricity farms and benefit from it, sure, but that's not even universally American thing.
Then you'd ask, can't those deserts like Gobi or Sahara or whatever provide enough land for PVs and PVs be good for those? Maybe, but that's terraforming scale of projects. Not microgrids.
It's not like skyscraper residential buildings exist solely because it's convenient to confine workers near factory sites or because the laborers own nothing - it starts appearing when it becomes impossible to simply distribute immediately available lands and land had become a contested resource. Think why they don't just expand cities outward or build new city cores. They don't because those buildings are solution to that becoming impossible. And with that, think again why they just go out and build those microgrids in cheap unused flat areas outside the city. Because there is no cheap unused flat areas outside the city.