Assessment of the solar power investment with feed-in tariff policy: A case in Taiwan

In Taiwan, solar power is a potential renewable energy to develop because of sufficient sunshine. From environmental and economic aspects, the government has conducted a policy to subsidize the individuals on installing the solar photovoltaic system from both financial assistance and buy-back assurance such as Feed-in Tariff scheme. It is an incentive for people invest such that both economic-benefits of making profits and environment-benefits of reducing carbon emissions can be achieved. Due to the possible risk embedded in this long-term investment, the purpose of this research is to help the investors to evaluate and analyze the expected return and potential risk through a proposed analytical model which determines the optimal installed capacity under the given guaranteed price for specific time period. The model has been applied to an enterprise in Taiwan with sensitivity analysis. The results have shown that the model is able to support decision in maximizing net benefit under uncertainty through the evaluation of the investment with the expected net present value, payback period and internal rate of return.