The problem with renewables is not the power generation, it's the energy storage.  Solar and wind generate power intermittently, sometimes when demand for the power is high and sometimes when it's not.  

Professor Donald Sadoway, an MIT professor of materials chemistry, thinks his liquid metal battery technology is the energy storage breakthrough we need.  It basically takes all the individual cells necessary for a large battery and replaces them with liquid metal, reducing cost and complexity. Lowering the cost of energy storage is necessary if a distributed network of renewable energy, such as solar and wind, is going to be successfully adopted on a massive scale.

The net zero buildings of the future will be like the energizer bunny with a large battery tucked into their backside to store excess energy the building is generating at peak generation hours.  

All the batteries on Earth only store 10 minutes of the world's energy needs.

Tesla is already deploying the battery technology they developed for cars into buildings in partnership with Solar City. Their Lithium Ion technology is still one of the more expensive ways to store energy. Each of the battery packs consists of hundreds of individual units bundled together.