Current retail prices in the UK are around £6/W for PVs vs 30p/W for solar hot water.
So a £5k PV system will only produce around a third of the household electricity and take around 15-20 years to pay back - longer if batteries need to be replaced.
As I said, prices need to drop substantially - i.e. by at least 75% - before a majority of people start taking PVs seriously as a grid alternative.
The political problem is that the energy companies have no interest in watching 30-80% of their market disappear. And since they have a more powerful lobby group than PV retailers do, I think we're unlikely to see any political support for PVs or solar any time soon.
Which is why the biggest driver of change is going to have to be a huge price drop and increased efficiency.
But one interesting thing is that the Victoria project is using a large number - 19250 - of relatively small CS 500 Heliostat dishes to produce the advertized 154 MW peak, so that's 8 kW peak per dish, so about 1.6 kW assuming 20% load (average price per dish of the plant is 18130 USD).
These numbers for one dish are not far from home consumption so this has great potential as a very distributed system.
Plant components: Heliostats - 19,250 Receivers - 246 PV Modules - 62,976
