Solar Is Nearly Competitive With Traditional Energy in Some Markets

This is good news. With all the progress being made it will eventually be cheaper than the Utility prices. We will also be Energy independent sooner rather than later.
We can do it.
Keep our $$$$$$$$$$$$$ home. Create our own ENERGY JOBS.
GO SOLAR.

Apples and oranges folks. Why compare these two radically different sources of energy. Do you also expect a Lexus to cost the same (or less) than a Kia?

There is a food forest in Viet Nam that has records for 28 generations, and it is exceedingly beautiful and productive, somehow having survived a war. What kind of person in the U.S. seems only to have an attention span of a few years. Are we really that unhealthy? If communities take a time-span for thinking about return out to 40 years, counting observation and learning as valuable during those 40 years, counting less asthma as valuable, and so on, we have ways of measuring investment that we need to use to re-set the ways we think about investment. I'm 59, with a go-round with cancer, and I'm still saying this (there are long-life genes in the pool I came from, so I could end up living another 40). Even if I croak personally, I have kids. I would rather reduce their risk of croaking early by reducing pollution and aggressive violence to secure dirty stuff to burn up. While Washington and New York trade the latest scandals, I hope the rest of the country figures ways to re-set our conservation and generation patterns. This boom/bust money/fossil thing has been done. Once should have been enough.

I don't seek to offend anyone, but taking my tax dollars and giving it to people to put expensive, inefficient PV on their fixed rooftops chaps my behind. It wouldn't be cost effective if it weren't for everyone's tax dollars. $56/F² for 13% true conversion rate. I feel offended. I hope the Mary Saunders' of the world gets cured of cancer, and see that research as a better use of my money.

Now I'm not just griping. I'm working 2 jobs, the second of which promises to get us solar energy around the clock from designing a new technology energy storage device. The government giving me, and other like inventors, back some of our tax dollars in research funding would be money better spent than giving banks and the idle well off money to give them a favorable IRR for patronizing a waste of this earth's finite resources that is PV fabrication on the scale we're seeing.

Hey PV industry: stop presenting your costs in terms of $/kW and tell us what the cost is in $/kWh produced, and put all the system costs in black and white up front, and folks would wise up. We need to build more efficient energy conversion systems while the combustion of millenia of stored solar energy is still cheap.

A CSP system designer.

Right, Don. ??? Do you really believe the whole costs of stored solar energy cumbustion are being known, divulged, or not subsidized?
The fault I find with the article author is that he sees PV as the only resource on the scene, when localized solar thermal is cheaper by twice, is proven to offset more CO2, and removes the need for most grid build. 50% of energy needs in the USA are for heating. That could be done more efficiently and with less polution, or NONE, with solar direct to thermal water and space.
Will we follow wall street off the cliff because we can't see thru the smoke and haze of resource competition?