The laws of physics cannot be ignored, page-3

Dead Pirate roberts
I do not know where this guy is coming from but he is way off base. I had a small solar company for about 7 years in retirement and did 4 to 10 houses a year. I retired from my real job at 55 solar at 65.

Lets just look at warrantee. All panels come with a 25 year warrantee. In US it is law that they have to replace the panel with no charge for the first 10 years if anything happens including power dropping below rated.. Most manufactures also will pay USD 300 to cover some of the labor cost of the swap. Right now the standard in the industries is the panel will put out a min 87% of the rated power for 25 years. This is a prorated line from 10 to 25 years. I have almost 1500 panels installed and I check them every month or two None have failed. None are even close to being below their rated output. Pannel output is stored on line every 15 minutes so I check from my home.

Optimizers. there is one optimizer per panel. This is a DSP card that monitors panel out put and system load and optimizes Voltage and current to achieve the highest output from the panel. It does this about 100 times a second. Even small clouds change things quickly

Inverters do fail. I recommended none of my customers buy extended warranties, Even though I was paid when they did, Simple reason the inverter on my home is 8 years old and was about 90 % efficient on day one. New one cost less than 50 % of what I paid and only a little more than what the 25 year warrantee would have cost. Most inverters are now about 97 ~ 99% efficient and have much better features. If mine does not die soon I might just scrap it. The new one will pay for itself in a few years. I receive MA SRECs of about $300 a MWH generated . They read inverter directly it is paperwork to swap it. So I will wait for 10 years to do it.

One comment on Panels in US, it may be the same in other countries, but I do not know. Panel output decay is exponential. with time. Most of the decline is in the first few years. 20 years ago manufactures rated panels on their day one output which just was not fair. Also some panels were realy bad in first few years for decline in output. The DOE stepped in and said for a panel to be eligible for rebates it had to put out its rated power at the ten tears. This is why there is no decay in the FIRST TEN years. The decay is noticeable for first 3 to 5 years but output is still way above rated. So just Rember you will have more than 87% of rated for the first 25 years. I cosigned loans for some of my customers with banks all had their systems paid for in less than 7 years. Government Rebates are not as good now as they were a few years ago. The price of equipment and panels has come way down so payoff is just a year or two longer.

Comments on article.
Section 1 I do not know when he did what he said but it must be 25 years ago it just is not true to day.
2 Yes inverters have about half the lifetime of panels. But with cost coming down while performance goes up you would probably want to replace at 10 to 15 years. Cost would be quickly recovered.
3 Most utilities have net metering which eliminates the need for storage entirely. Some Utilities will now cover most of your battery cost if you let them control taking of power during peak times. They pay well for the power they take. I received many solicitations from my utility and state who will finance my part for 5 years at 0% I have not done it. It means a new inverter and a separate controller, and they do not help with that. I may do it when and if I replace inverter.
4&5 has absolutly nothing to do with solar just a throw in of something he thinks is a negative.

Depending on how you value features they may be at parity today or it may be many years away. Also Gas in my area is dropping rapidly while electric is souring. I think is mainly because of demand dropping for Gas which always happens going into a recession. The hedges utilities buy to level out their fuel cost expiring. Raising their cost. Some day EVs will reach lifetime cost with ICE. Right now I would not try to guess when that will be too much is changing.