Serious critics of solar (and wind) power where never about price[1], they were about about availability and, as expected, with the growing share of wind and solar in the electricity mix the grid is getting more and more disturbed when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine for a few days.

[1] in fact, price is a terrible metric when talking about electricity because you can't (realistically) store it, even today. Price only make sense when you have a bunch of fossil fuel power plant sitting idle, waiting for the break-even price to happen before adding their power to the grid.

Solar power isn't cost effective, which is why there's now an energy crisis in Europe ... it became a lot cheaper, but it didn't reach the point of making economic sense for it to replace other forms of power at scale, largely due to fundamentals outside of the semiconductor industry: lack of reliable sunshine, lack of sufficiently cheap batteries, etc.

I used to live in Western Australia. Vast areas of land with extremely reliable sunshine, and very little other uses [0].

The storage problem is being solved, battery tech is hot and getting hotter (kinda pun intended).

The transmission problem is still being worked on - there are unconventional options for cheap, plentiful solar power, like extracting hydrogen from seawater and then shipping the hydrogen to power plants near where the power is needed.

The costs used to be prohibitive because the panels were so expensive. But the tech for solar panels has progressed hugely (and quickly) and this is no longer a factor.

Solar power plants will never be a drop-in replacement for fossil fuel plants, for the reasons you describe. But that doesn't mean we can't replace fossil fuel plants with an energy system that uses solar power for generation.

The same will happen with vat-grown meat. One by one the difficulties will be overcome and the commercial problems will be solved. What we end up with will probably not look anything like our current meat industry. But it will replace our current meat industry.

[0] apologies to the indigenous people who have "used" this land for tens of thousands of years and would probably disagree with this statement.

Western Australia is the absolute best case possible for solar panel cost effectiveness though. You can't generalize from that to it being cost effective everywhere. Lots of people live in places like Europe where there often isn't strong sunshine, and there isn't a lot of available land. And as for being solved, well, that's my point. Batteries have been around for over a century. They haven't gone through some sort of exponential progress explosion that renders them "too cheap to meter". They improve but only incrementally and it's simply not enough.