PG&E will shut off power for nearly 800,000 customers starting Wednesday

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BA you have to remember that you are talking about a state that is almost constantly considered being in drought due to the lack of rainfall, especially in this time of year. Where are you going to get the water to fill those tanks?

If you aren't drinking it, California is coastal. Take it out of the ocean. Salt water is just as heavy as fresh water, just remember to mention the salt water when you place the order for the turbines and pumps.

As for the solar cells in question, considering that the 15% capacity cells are not really cost efficient compared to normal production methods, i would have to say no.

Panasonic currently markets commercially available cells with a minimum efficiency rating of 19.4%. Is that a large enough change for you to feel better about the ability of solar power to keep the lights on? What would be high enough?

and before anyone jumps on me about cost effectiveness, what is the life expectancy of those solar panels and what are you going to do with them once you have to replace them?

Wind turbines are the ones that I've heard problems about recycling myself. Issues with the composites in the blades I believe.
Back to solar...
Manufacturers generally give a warranty of 20-25 years, so many life-cycle estimates use 30 years or so. This drops if you have a lot of hail, tornadoes or similar voicing an opinion about your infrastructure, of course. A quick googling gives a loss rate of less than 1% per year. Frequently more like 0.5%, so it doesn't drop to useless until it's second century or so assuming you keep the panels clean. No idea about the recycling options.

The thing to remember about all the major blackouts (accidental, that is) we've had is that they all pretty much stem from the same root cause that started the domino effect: high-voltage transmission lines going down - usually due to them drooping into trees during periods of high loads.

Yup. I've actually done some (very tiny) study on this and it's not just one short either, the systems are usually designed to deal with that. It's what was referred to in the material for the course as 'non-random' failures in the grid. That is, the overloaded lines sag a littler further on a hot day, touch a tree and then go 'trip, trip, trip' ever faster through the redundancies one after another in a given area until there's no redundancies left and then there aren't any lights on at all. If you have it happen in the wrong spot you get...

On the flip side, a single issue in a large power grid can take out power to millions of people. (55 million people in 8 states and southern Ontario were affected by a software glitch in Ohio in 2003, for example.)

^This. The software glitch just made it worse.

The simplified list of things that made it non-random were, as I recall, high temperatures plus power companies not trimming the trees and wind plus power companies not trimming trees. It was something of a theme. A frustrating theme, but a theme.