How Fast Will Solar Take Over?

Never, per se?

You can define "take over" in different ways to change the answer. Put yourself into the position of some big customer. Will you change your usage profile to get really cheap electricity, or not? Solar will or won't take over the customer you're thinking of.

Many people don't grasp how cheap solar is becoming. We're close to the point where solar+batteries becomes the cheapest way to provide nighttime power in a few regions, which astonishes me. And the prices of both solar and batteries still drop quickly.

Exactly. We need something to generate baseload instead of coal and natural gas. Nuclear, geothermal, and hydro are our best options.

The other major issue to address with solar: the mining of materials, manufacturing and distribution of solar panels absolutely requires fossil fuels. There has never been a solar panel or wind turbine created without it - not even as a demonstration, let alone the decades it would take to build out the infrastructure. If solar "took over", it would only do last another 20-25 years without a viable supply chain.

Put another way: the sun and the wind are renewable, but solar panels and wind turbines are certainly not. And without a viable path to a carbon-free supply chain, we'd be on borrowed time. As such, it's more accurate to think of "renewables" as fossil fuel extenders, allowing us to burn carbon and spread the energy return out over a couple decades.