Abstract. Installing a solar photovoltaic (PV) array is both an environmental and a financial decision. The financial arguments often take priority over the environmental because installing solar is capital-intensive. The Simple Payback period (SPB) is often assessed prior to the adoption of solar PV at a residence or a business. Although it better describes the value of solar PV electricity in terms of sustainability, the Energy Payback period (EPB) is seldom used to gauge the merits of an installation. Using published estimates of embodied energies, EPB was calculated for four solar PV plants utilizing crystalline-Si technology: three being actual commercial installations located in the northeastern U.S., and a fourth installation based on a simulated 20-kilowatt roof-mounted system, in Wrocław, Poland. Simple Payback was calculated based on initial capital cost, and on the availability of avoided electricity costs based on netmetering tariffs, which at present in the U.S. are 1:1 credit ratio, and in Poland is 1:0.7 credit ratio. For all projects, the EPB time was estimated at between 1.9 and 2.6 years. In contrast, the SPB for installed systems in the northeastern U.S. ranged from 13.3 to 14.6 years, and was estimated at 13.5 years for the example system in Lower Silesia, Poland. The comparison between SPB and EPB shows a disparity between motivational time frames, in which the wait for financial return is considerably longer than the wait for net energy harvest and the start of sustainable power production.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.