nature.com
Part of that was developing a software implementation of the UK government's Standard Assessment Procedure for estimating solar yields.
It's really quite surprising just how much energy falls on a single square meter on a south facing roof even in the North of England.
It's going to be interesting to see where this market goes in the next 10 years.
So whatever solar energy collection you do has to be spread out over a relatively large area. This quickly creates several problems, first of all creating that volume of solar capturing devices, and then the environmental impact of taking the solar energy from whatever else might be using it (e.g. plant life that would otherwise be growing on "solar farm" land).
A bigger issue that storage is the utilities' desire to make it difficult and uneconomic to hook up panels to the grid.
They make the greatest profits during the times when electricity usage peaks - coincidentally which is when solar panels are at their most productive (midday; especially during summertime).
However, my understanding is that utilities are happy with PV offsetting peak load, because in those situations they either have to buy power from someone else or fire up expensive peaker plants, and in the vast majority of markets they can't charge their customers for it because most customers don't have a time-of-use tariff.