Start with the current icon, but render the light in a dirty yellow instead of blue, with a crack across the lens, and give the metal bezel some moderate rust and other damage.

> Solar panels require an accompanying energy storage system

So put a small battery module under each panel. It's not like much can grow there besides grass, and there's plenty of that between rows of panels.

You've got what, a 2x1 meter plot of land for each panel? If you allow for a 1 meter panel height, that's slightly less than 2 cubic meters of volume you could fill with batteries (allowing for some loss of volume for the module's outer casing). That is a LOT of space, even if what you fill it with is little better than a stack of car batteries. The panel would then simply be mounted directly on top of the battery module's outer casing, with an appropriate tilt of course.

Since the panel is already producing DC, you'd only need a beefy diode on its output, which then leads to the master power rail that feeds the inverting station. The battery module would need a regulator circuit on it since the panel's voltage is by definition variable, and a circuit that'll hard-bridge the battery to the primary rail when its voltage exceeds the panel's (that's the reason for the big diode -- some panels will actually emit light and then burn out when excessively back-fed).

Need more storage? Make the battery module 2 meters tall, and either just adapt your maintenance process to deal with the height, or better yet dig a hole and bury the bottom half, and design the module so that it can trivially be raised out of the ground for maintenance. That would naturally mean sacrificing some of the horizontal dimensions for the lift and the hole's retaining walls, but then you can use as much height/depth as you want, up to the load limit of the ground under it.

The inverting station still has to deal with a variable incoming DC rail, but now it'll be less-variable than before, and it merely has to be regulated, inverted, and sent out onto the grid, without the need for a dedicated battery facility or building expansion. The cost savings on that would surely make-up for the increased cost of having all those per-panel modules.

If a battery module goes down, just shut the damn thing off until it can be repaired or replaced. The panel can keep providing juice, and the inverting facility won't even notice either way (sure, I realize you could do something similar with an all-in-one storage facility, but this seems like it would be easier to deal with).

There, that solves the storage problem pretty well, imho.

The startup is laser focused

No, lasers aren't focused

A laser beam is still just light, and no beam of light exists that doesn't diverge. Just because it's all one wavelength doesn't mean it isn't still composed of photons acting like photons.

When last I checked, all optical drives -- from CD to Blu-Ray, and even old M-O and floptical formats -- have movable lenses, and actually DO focus their lasers onto the media, since the beam has to be tight enough to fit within the width of one track[*] at the point where it lands (or at least, tight enough that noise from adjacent tracks isn't significant).

No two discs are perfectly identical in thickness or flatness, and no two will sit on the spindle at precisely the same Z position, so the drive has to be able to actively compensate for variations in the distance between the reflective layer and the read sensor. You can only do that by explicitly focusing the beam such that its reflection hits the sensor with the intensity range the electronics expect.

Sure, your cat will still happily chase that elusive little red dot whether it's a few millimeters bigger than it theoretically ought to be or not, but on the other hand, that missile you intend to shoot down is just gonna brush you off, and your kickass 100 mile line of sight connection isn't gonna work too well, if half your beam misses its target due to divergence.

[*] or whatever you want to call the adjacent turns of the spiral of bits on CDs and their kin.

Maybe because in the case of computers, even the dumbest user wouldn't mistake that setting/switch for something involving an internal combustion engine, let alone something that compresses air into one.

Besides, many computers have at least one centrifugal fan in them... that's kinda-sorta like an electric turbocharger, if you squint at it just right, and in many cases they spool-up as system load increases. :-)