Important to put the numbers in to context. They mention an increase from 0.5% land use for energy production to 3% in their net-zero scenario. It's a significant enough number that well thought out policy is needed, but according to this, 1.7% of the world's land is urban, 7.1% village, 14% cropland, and 26% pasture land. The 3% for energy production is a large increase in magnitude relative to existing energy infrastructure, but a drop in the bucket compared to total human land use (actually much less than I expected). Now add on top of this the fact that a lot the land for renewables will probably be dual use, such as wind farms on cropland, or solar on rooftops or pasture land, and it seems like it's actually quite a manageable number.

Of note:
> "The total land use of a wind power plant comprises the area within the perimeter surrounding all turbines."

i.e., the inter-turbine area is counted as "used", even if it's 99% available for farming or wildlife.

You can see this more clearly in Table 11 where there's an order-of-magnitude difference between "single string" (one line of turbines that need spacing only in a single direction) and other types (where spacing is needed in both ground directions due to multiple lines of turbines). 100 turbines in a 2D configuration has no larger of a tower footprint on the ground than 100 turbines in a "single string" (1D) configuration, yet their methodology would assign its land use as 10x as much and hence its power density as 10x lower.

As a result, the values in this paper can not reasonably be considered land used for power generation, as their definitions often mean that the vast majority of the area they calculate will be fully available for its prior use.

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Direct link to Figure 14, which tells how many TWh electricity in a year you get from 1 km^2 of area, with different power sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25341-9/figures/14