Abstract

The economic feasibility of the investment is critical for residential users’ decision making in investing in photovoltaic (PV) systems because the high costs of installing PV technology may be burdensome. Therefore, governments in many countries have been implementing policies to reduce the economic burden of household users' PV investments and thus promote solar energy to household users. The purpose of this paper is to perform an economic feasibility analysis of investments in residential PV systems that considers the effects of several subsidy plan alternatives using the empirical data of Korea. The result shows that the residential PV investment project would be economically viable without subsidy; however, a payback period exceeds 8 years, which could be perceived by residential customers as too long to be attractive enough to invest in a PV system at present. In addition, we found that the net present value is highest under the production based subsidy scheme, whereas the payback period is shortest with a lump-sum subsidy.

摘要

投资的经济可行性对于住宅用户投资光伏 (PV) 系统的决策至关重要，因为安装光伏技术的高成本可能是负担。因此，许多国家的政府一直在实施政策，以减轻家庭用户光伏投资的经济负担，从而向家庭用户推广太阳能。本文的目的是对住宅光伏系统的投资进行经济可行性分析，该分析考虑了使用韩国经验数据的几种补贴计划替代方案的影响。结果表明，住宅光伏投资项目在没有补贴的情况下经济可行；然而，投资回收期超过8年，这可能会被居民客户认为时间太长，目前不足以投资光伏系统。此外，我们发现基于生产的补贴计划的净现值最高，而一次性补贴的投资回收期最短。