The biggest roadblock to widespread adoption of solar as a baseload power source is the storage problem. Photovoltaics stop producing power when the sun goes down, that's not just inconvenient it's unworkable with the way power is used today. Until we can economically shift the output curve of solar power plants to match demand rather than supply it will always fill no more than a niche. Today the only way to do this is to work in concert with hydropower, but that is a very limited solution.
Also, it's not strictly necessary to solve the problem on a large scale, even at a small consumer-grade scale it could be helpful. If every house had a battery pack or supercap bank or what-have-you and it allowed for smoothing out power demand or perhaps enabled charging electric vehicles overnight, then it could have a huge impact on energy usage patterns. Even with the PV -> battery -> battery losses it would still be a substantial net win.
That's only a problem that's much farther down the road, say when solar penetration goes above 10% or 20%.
In the mean time you could just throttle hydro plants and natural gas plants to account for both usage variations as well as wind and solar production variations.
It's a problem preventing solar penetration beyond a niche market. It also, as you point out, prevents solar from actually displacing existing power plant capacity. That means that solar power comes at an extraneous cost, since it doesn't obviate the need of building even a single non-solar power plant. Those are big problems and it's not as though we're magically going to start building lots and lots of solar power capacity without solving those problems. The sooner their tackled the faster those technologies will be on the amortization/improvement train and their costs will fall.
Solar and wind are today just sideshows in power production, if you want them to be otherwise the smart move is to invest in storage technologies.
I agree with your sentiment, but solar prices have plummeted and clever new financing arrangements from Solar City et al. have made them much more accessible, in the US at least.
Bad things are cheap to benefit from only when one is allowed to dump the real costs on others. Real costs were allowed to be dumped aside on others only because there weren't any real alternative solutions for problems at hand. Things change.
For example, beyond a certain size, our cities would be unlivable without waste regulations. So the freedom to throw their waste out of the front door was taken away for people living in cities.
> The biggest roadblock to widespread adoption of solar as a baseload power source is the storage problem.
While solar as a baseload source is being pursued (with molten salt as a "heat battery") - already installed [1], this is not what "solar power" is generally referring to.
The essential solar vision is to decentralize power production, and literally go "power to the people" with residential and commercial panel installations that supplement the need for grid power.
While batteries at this level would be preferred (allowing installations to go entirely "grid optional" or "off grid"), simply augmenting grid power would likely greatly affect base load requirements for the centralized power plants (by reducing peaks).
Also, it's not strictly necessary to solve the problem on a large scale, even at a small consumer-grade scale it could be helpful. If every house had a battery pack or supercap bank or what-have-you and it allowed for smoothing out power demand or perhaps enabled charging electric vehicles overnight, then it could have a huge impact on energy usage patterns. Even with the PV -> battery -> battery losses it would still be a substantial net win.