Those big, free-standing arrays are unbeautiful, but bother nobody if you put them in a field of sunflowers or a pasture; on a roof, you hardly see them at all.
I guess people are so used to hydro poles and cables and grey canisters and warning signs and cherry-pickers with guys aloft, forever tinkering, and backhoes ripping out old posts and planting new, recently-dead trees, that they don't see it anymore. Somehow, I've never gotten used to that - it's so damned
sloppy!
I suppose, too, it hasn't dawned on most people yet that they actually can be in control, rather than just griping about their utility bills - which they do, constantly!
There are whole anti-wind turbine groups because apparently these farms have destroyed some peoples lives forcing them to move because they can't handle the noise. I haven't witnessed it myself but I'm open to the possibility that it could be very bad.
They say it makes them literally ill, and their cows, too. Maybe there is a sensitivity issue - and I'm not in favour of punishing sensitivity. We parked and sat directly under one of the 'friendly giants' for a half hour last summer, and were not bothered by the hum, but might feel differently if it went on day after day.
There is more wrong with big turbines and wind farms, even in the desert: the grid. Miles of wires - even if buried, miles of ditch to dig. Waste. Transfer stations. Bird massacre - the Dear knows we can't spare many more!
I like the look of big turbines, but not the principle. Small, bladeless and quiet is the way to go.
Brain -- The figure I've heard on grids is power losses around 25-30%.
Whoa! Of course, the infrastructure is aging and badly overloaded in many places. There will be more blackouts, especially in rural areas.
The virtue of grids, despite the negatives Serp mentioned which I agree with, is that they distribute power from sporadic sources, e.g. on a cloudy day on the coast, Spokane can send surplus solar over to Seattle, on a calm day inland Seattle can send surplus sea breeze power to Spokane.
That's all the more reason to have back-up systems, from whatever local sources are available. There is saline gradient
http://salinitygradientpower.eu/project/, tidal and wave on the coast; rivers, wind, methane and geothermal inland. And, of course, there is storage - both the quality and the capacity of batteries are being improved all the time.
The elephant, of course, is profligacy. The cities that obscure the sky and kill more millions of birds, really don't need to be visible from Mars. Haven't corporate executives been nagged as little children to turn off the light when they left a room? Maybe they didn't have fathers. We wouldn't need half the heating and a quarter of the cooling, if we built houses properly - and we've known this for a while now. We don't need half the labour-saving appliances and luxuries people stockpile to impress one another. Etc - you know the refrain.