This article is good overall, and the map of solar capacity factor by US state is especially good, but it does have some flaws.<p>First, and most trivially, Potter's plot of PV module prices overstates their cost by a factor of about three to five. His last data point is US$0.31 per (peak) watt in 02023. <a href="https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preisindex/" rel="nofollow">https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...</a> shows a price of 0.26€ per peak watt in June 02023 for "mainstream" solar panels, which is in reasonably good agreement. But "low cost" panels were only €0.16/Wp, and since then prices have dropped by more than half, to €0.110/Wp for mainstream panels and €0.070/Wp for low-cost. (A footnote misstates this cost as $36 per megawatt, which would be $0.000036/W.)<p>Prices in the US are of course much higher, but that's due to inefficient regulatory interference in the market to protect uncompetitive and environmentally destructive fossil-fuel interests.<p>Another weak point is that the article doesn't consider thermal energy storage systems, neither sensible heat energy storage systems like a hot water heater or a sand battery, nor phase-change energy storage like the ice chillers used for decades in many office buildings and the MIT Solar I house built in 01939†, nor TCES systems using desiccants such as muriate of lime, carnallite, or tachyhydrite. Sensible heat energy storage has been a crucial part of domestic climate control for millennia, for example in the form of adobe, and can time-shift your entire HVAC energy load to hours when your solar panels are producing. The newer systems may be able to do the same at a lower cost and are certainly easier to retrofit into existing construction. This will dramatically drop the storage requirements for things like his example house, though it will not help with transportation and much industrial energy consumption.<p>Maybe its most glaring weak point, though, is that it compares costs in the US and Europe, but entirely ignores China, where the vast majority of new power plants are being built, where the majority of world coal consumption happens, and where the overwhelming majority of photovoltaic panels are made. (India and the Middle East are also ignored and may turn out to be very important, but at present their potential is largely unrealized.) Writing an article about understanding solar energy this year without talking about China is like writing an article about understanding automobiles in 01940 without talking about the US. You can probably find a magazine article from 01940 that does that, but probably only in French.<p>______<p>† You could argue that the qanat represents a form of ancient Zarathustran phase-change energy storage that is much older than MIT Solar I, but I think that only applies if your buildings are responsible for condensing the water to fill the qanat.