Like how we grow crops in summer to take us through winter can the same be done for solar
Edit - reviewed and fixed due to cal vs kcal error.
The reason we don't store energy overwinter like we store food is that there is a 10x difference in daily needs of food compared to electricity. We need about 2,500 watt hours per day of food, but our houses consume around 29,000 watt hours per day of electricity.
Food:
A laboratory standard human requires 2,000 kcalories per day input to live and work. Less if they don't move much and are in a temperate climate, more if they perform a lot of physical labor and are in a cold environment.
Assuming winter is 4 months long, then 120 days of food are needed, or about 240,000 kcalories. That's 150lb of rice (assuming 1,600 kcalories per dry pound), so you can meet the caloric needs of 1 adult human with a small stack of three 50lb bags of rice, or about $160*.
There are 860 calories in one watt hour. Humans need under 2,500 watt hours per day.
So that entire winter's worth of rice represents 279,000 watt hours of energy. This represents less than $50 of electricity depending on your local utility rate.
Animals (ie, humans) and plants are very efficient at energy conversion.
Electricity:
The average household in the US consumes around 886kWH per month. So over a four month winter you'd need 3,544,000 watt hours stored up, or 3.5MWH.
Low cost residential battery storage is around $100/kwh. So you'd need around $350k just for the batteries. You'd then need to collect 3.5MWH over the other 8 months of the year, on top of your residential consumption, either by buying electricity (charging at night when rates are low, for instance) or by building a 15kWH to 30kwh solar array, depending on your location and solar insolation. At $0.50 per kw, the solar would cost around $8k to $16k. You'd need to pay more for wiring, inverters, charge controllers, mounts, battery storage room, etc.
Newer technologies promise grid scale solar energy storage as low as $132/MWH (iron oxide batteries, Bezos backed research) but those are 1) a long way off, 2) new research so are unlikely to meet stated goals, and 3) prices assuming a utility is buying hundreds of GWH of storage, not just a few MWH.
That 3.5MWH of battery storage is comparable to 3 billion kcalories, or about 3.8 years of food energy the average human needs.
Conclusion:
It would be expensive, prohibitively so for most people, to store enough electricity to last all winter, since we consume 10 times more energy as electricity than we consume as food, and food, as a basic need, is very cheap compared to electrical storage and generation.
Conversely, it takes a space, time, water, and effort to grow and harvest 150lb of rice. About 7,400lb of rice is harvested per acre in intensive rice farm operations, so about 800 square feet of rice in fertile soil, along with nutrients, water, weeding (usually chemical), etc will supply enough energy for one human over the winter, or about 2,400 square feet for the whole year. That's enough space for a 23kw solar array, which would meet the electrical needs of a human for a year, assuming a method of storage is managed.
So there's a lot of energy just being thrown around and wasted in electricity, but our solar panels are more efficient than growing crops, there's just that little problem of feeding humans electricity.
This all changes if we lower our energy consumption. Smaller dwellings, underground with great nearly perfect insulation, lower light levels, more raw foods (ie, reduce heat required for cooking), no AC, smaller fridges and freezers, etc, etc, etc. But even then, a large TV consumes in an hour what a human needs in one winter, so you'd have to be very, very frugal with energy to reduce the 10:1 ratio between electrical consumption and food consumption enough to be practical.
*Note that the rice requires at least soaking if not cooking to get all the calories available out of it, and this water and heat represent a not insignificant amount of energy as well.
