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> I find it continually strange how much more attention solar gets than wind.

It's because solar gets cheaper faster than wind does. The experience rate is higher.

The learning rate for a solar panel may be higher than a wind turbine, but when you include installation costs, it's no longer the case because the solar panels have become so cheap that the cost is installation-dominated, and installation learns slow.

Over the last 5-10 years, wind has been learning faster than solar.

Granted. This does, however, lead to interesting ideas where one tries to exploit the extreme low cost of panels while minimizing everything else.

I harp on one of this ideas a lot, Standard Thermal's resistive artificial geothermal idea. Their idea is to use densely packed fix orientation (to reduce mounting cost) panels feeding DC resistive heaters to produce heat that is stored in dirt for 100% availability. The projection here is 600 C heat at $3-5/GJ, which is close to the cost of heat from combustion of Henry Hub natural gas (natural gas at the customer end of the pipeline/distribution network will be considerably more expensive.)

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