Solar sucks, and always will.
Let's put it this way, if you covered AZ, NM, part of CA, west Texas, and southern Utah, you would generate enough energy for the US (well, current usage)...at a cost of close to $10-15 trillion dollars.
Oh, and since you need power at night, pumped storage is the only conceivable method for that large of storage, which would involve filling and draining a lake mead size reservoir (completely) with roughly 500 hydro power stations the size of Hoover dam--at an additional cost of $5-10 trillion dollars.
Correspondingly, the same overall power generation could be done with roughly 1000 nuke plants, which would cost roughly $5-10 trillion...or 2-3x less.
Most importantly, those 1000 plants, with NRC mandated 400m exclusion zones, would take up an area only <20 miles on a side...or roughly 1/3rd the size of rhode island (or 1/4 the size of the Nevada test site...hmmm....)
So which would you rather have...power that is 3x as expensive and covers a substantial fraction of CONUS, or power that fits in an area smaller than 1/3rd of an already existing test site and is much cheaper?
Again, solar sucks, and wimd is worse. Every (and I mean EVERY) wind installation ever built has required construction or addition of a similar nameplate capacity gas turbine system for load stability, and EVERY wind system, is 5-10x more expensive in life cycle cost than any other form of power--the only reason it is installed at all is subsidies (either direct or through tax breaks)--so basically, your tax dollars at work.