I once thought of solar driftdriver, and thought so much that I added some relevant courses to my college curriculum. I had one professor who was an ideologue, named John Holdren, and one great professor, Marshall Merriam, who was a professor of materials science. Holdren provided facts but reached conclusions inconsistent with his facts. Merriam, who actually supervised research, an activity Holdren never participated in, had me do a research paper, which results I have never forgotten. I had only to drive by the two expensive new building in San Jose with the glitzy façade and Solyndra on its signs, and after learning their stated objective, and knowing the cost of silicon manufacture, know certainly that it was a boondoggle.
The sun's energy flux density, with no losses from water vapor (the largest sink for solar energy), at the equator, is slightly less than 1 KW/square meter. If you live in Arizona, on clear and low humidity days during the optimal summer months, you might see 600 watts/avg for six hours, requiring tracking collectors. Taking optimistic estimates for conversion efficiency, solar flux density limits electricity derived from the sun to about 10 watts/square meter over 14 hours, whether solar-thermal-electric or photoelectric, and I'm assuming your batteries and DC/AC conversion are lossless - they aren't. One square meter will almost keep your CFD light-bulb lit for twenty four hours. Keep that 10 watts/square meter around, and figure if you don't live in Arizona or New Mexico or parts of Utah, that it will be much less, and non-existent during cloudy winter days. The Southern States have, as many of us have experienced, lots of water vapor - good for your complexion but not your collectors. Use the back of an envelope to figure how big a field of heliostats (mirrors) needs to be to replace a typical 2000 Megawatt nuclear plant.
Solar energy has its applications, such as heating swimming pools and preheating water - low quality but legitimate applications. It has high value applications like telephones in the desert. But solar flux density hopefully won't change much for a few million years, and limits it application to high quality dense energy applications to fleecing the naive, in Holdren’s case, because he believed that the world has too many stupid people who have toys and a life style they don't really need. “From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.”
It is startling to see how many people with accolades, or at least, degrees, are certain that our earth has about five times the number of inhabitants it can support. That is certainly the belief of Holdren’s mentor, Paul Ehrlich, with whom Holdren wrote a textbook almost as silly, if it weren't frightening, as Ehrlich's ridiculously wrong “Population Bomb.”
For any trying to make sense of my numbers, I typed “14 hours” bet meant “24 hours.” in my reply to driftdriver, who is “thinking solar.”
Yes Solar isn’t as economical as power from the grid. That really isn’t the point.