1) Today: 25 cents/kWh residential PV, 12-15 cents/kWh industrial PV and 8 cents/kWh thermal solar on the GW scale. Ten years from now: 30% less. 25 years from now: 60% less. I bet you can afford that.

2) No, he didn't. But he fooled you quite well with language that is fluffy and sweet, like cotton candy. And like cotton candy the article contained little that is actually nourishing.

1) You've neglected the cost for new (non-waste)silicon, additional storage, transmission lines, maintenence and labor of pv systems. The boundries for eroei analysis are greater than those for energy efficiency studies

2)Your analogy is lacking. Cotton candy is light and contains little caloric content but is full of embodied energy. She spinning machine and labor use a lot of energy

1) What I quoted was total cost of ownership divided by total energy produced. That is usually what you do for all other electrical sources, too. Transmission cost of PV is lower than that of conventional power sources because the generator can be on your roof rather than three hundred miles away. There is even an over-unity net gain because local generation causes smaller peak loads in summer and the reduction of I2R losses from the coal fired or nuclear or whatever power plant will show up as a greater than unity transmission efficiency for PV (all other things being equal). There is never a free lunch, but sometimes there is a win-win.

2) I meant to say that cotton candy has a lot of calories but you couldn't survive on it. A pure cotton candy diet leads to avitaminosis and lack of essential amino acids and fatty acids. Please don't ever try. No matter how much of that stuff you will eat, you will always get sick and ultimately die.

What we need here are essential facts, not BA kind of fluff!

Then you will have to incalculate that: either the panels are on the roofs, where people live, or they are in a place where there is more sunlight in a better angle, where they can be more efficient.

IP

I agree that an article should ultimately be judged by the quality of the data and argument, but when did good writing become a character flaw? Most scientific writing suffers from a terrible form of prose that follws the following sentence structure ad nauseum: preposition...preposistion...linking verb...preposition...preposition.

E.g.

The cost OF installation OF solar panels WITH the new technology invented BY our company IS less than the cost OF operating the older system WITH the inefficiencies inherit In the system.

or

The effect OF the medication ON systolic blood pressure IN the experimental group WAS greater than the effect ON the placebo group IN this study.

This latter sentence could be rendered:

The medication effectively reduced the experimental group's systolic blood pressure more than the placebo group's.

By avoiding all the prepositions and allowing an action verb to create some of the sentence's meaning, the point is made more clearly and is easier to read.

If you read a lot of scientific writing, like I do, pay attention as you read. You'll become aware of how repetitive and redundant this lazy form of writing is and how it detracts from the writing and makes the point less clear. And then you'll realise how refreshing it is to read something like Mr. Cleveland's essay.

Oh, and yes, the "repetitive and redundant" phrase was intentional.

While a lot of prepositions is possibly harder to read, it may ease the task of expressing a complex sentence/idea as exactly as possible.
A bit of nitpicking here, Your rendition of the medical phrase differs from the original (it seems to me that the "effect" in the original phrase is not quantified, it could be positive or negative, or chaotic?).

Yea, you're right. "effectively" is superfluous. I shouldn't criticize poor writing without taking the time to avoid other writing pitfalls!