One of the commenters on the article lives in rural Texas where it's too expensive to run electricity.
He lives comfortably on ~300 watts and recently bought a 100 watt panel for $130 shipped. His biggest expense? Batteries. Solar panels last, but batteries have to be constantly maintained and replaced.
Without a cheap, reliable storage medium, solar is useless or extremely expensive. All the more so at power plant scale. Maybe solar+hydro combination installations would work.
You mean in the far-from-norm situation you mentioned, is solar "useless" without storage. And even in that context, you're wrong. Many off-the-grid electricity consumers use diesel or fuel-oil based generators, there are already many solar systems that feed into such systems, backing off fuel usage when solar resources are available, then getting out of the way when it's not. No storage necessary.
In the "real-world", solar is connected to the grid, and the grid acts like the storage.
Storage becomes an actual concern when solar becomes a large fraction of the grid usage. Or in somewhat contrived situations such as an off-the-grid home using solar as the sole source of power.
Actually the grid has the same storage problem. On a small scale you can dump power into it and it is just a drop in the bucket. But on a large scale, you can't store power easily.
The most efficient alternative is to pump water up, then drop it through a turbine later. But world wide the total storage is only 3% of instantaneous generation capacity. So you can absorb/produce less than an hour's worth of electricity. Good for evening out a little fluctuation, but not a big one.
This is why natural gas is catching on. You can spin it up and down quickly, to accommodate the fact that wind and solar fluctuate quickly. By comparison both coal and nuclear require boiling a big tank of water. That's slow to heat up, and slow to cool down, so it doesn't adjust very fast as external power changes.
Fracking might have more to do with its sudden resurgence it than peaker plants, although granted it is probably the easiest power source to scale up and down.
"Without a cheap, reliable storage medium, solar is useless or extremely expensive. All the more so at power plant scale."
Really? Why is it more so at power plant scale? When you're connected to the grid you have the benefit of being attached to more users, which seems like it'd increase the probability that someone somewhere could use the power. Lots of power plants - e.g. anything fossil fuel based can simply burn less fuel - can reduce their output fairly simply, so until they all bottom out it seems you wouldn't have a problem getting the energy to someone who wants it.
Where this starts to fall apart is transmission losses; there is benefit to having the consumers and producers be closer together, in terms of resistance. It's possible that high-Tc superconductors may help in this space in the coming decades.
He lives comfortably on ~300 watts and recently bought a 100 watt panel for $130 shipped. His biggest expense? Batteries. Solar panels last, but batteries have to be constantly maintained and replaced.
Without a cheap, reliable storage medium, solar is useless or extremely expensive. All the more so at power plant scale. Maybe solar+hydro combination installations would work.