I play devil’s advocate sometimes and search for negative press about solar panels. It’s not something you see every day.
Today there was a Beltway blogger claiming that some photo-voltaic solar panels that appeared in a photo-op with Barack Obama will take 110 YEARS to pay for themselves. He is basing this on one quote from a civil servant and the estimate was related to a purchasing option that did not happen. There is not enough public information for me to try to come to an independent estimate of the payback time for that particular installation.
You have to take just about any estimate of how long it will take before your solar panels pay for themselves with a grain of salt. The cost of energy derived from fossil fuels fluctuates a lot in response to supply, demand and geopolitics. Supply is really going to come into play in the coming decades. Once solar panels are in place, they provide energy for decades without any additional inputs.
Another variable is the amount of sunlight that hits your little patch of Earth. Solar water heaters can pay for themselves pretty quickly in sunny spots like the California but Londoners might never live to see payback.
I did a quick and dirty survey on the Internet and I saw figures ranging from 10 years all the way up to 200 years. A company that installs residential solar panels made a somewhat convincing estimate of 15 years before their solar panels pay for themselves.
SolarTradingPost.com saved me a lot of work by publishing an online Solar Payback Calculator
Lots of effort is going into lowering the cost of solar panels but the majority of the panels on the market are still first generation types that cannot be made much cheaper than they already are. Going with DIY solar panels can shorten solar panel payback time by eliminating some of the costs. Every bit of sweat equity that you can afford to put into your solar energy solution will make the dream of free energy that much closer. Pay someone tens of thousands of dollars to design and install a solar panel installation for your home you may not see a real return on that investment in your lifetime.
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