Internalizing land use impacts for life cycle cost analysis of energy systems: A case of California’s photovoltaic implementation

Solar photovoltaic (PV) is a rapidly growing electricity generation technology. The increasing penetration of this technology is facilitated by incentives and public policy support that are being offered by various jurisdictions. There are various options for installing photovoltaic systems, rooftop and ground mounted systems being the two common options. The choice between these options has been complicated by the tradeoffs between cost and land use impacts. In this paper we develop a framework that can be used to highlight and quantify the tradeoffs between costs and land using life cycle costs (LCC), life cycle land use footprints (LUF), and consequent land use impacts (LUI) across various options of implementing PV systems. We demonstrate the application of the framework using a hypothetical case study of implementing various options of PV systems in California. The results indicate that at 14.2¢/kWh, the utility-scale ground mounted option has the lowest LCC compared to residential and commercial rooftop mounted options. However, the utility-scale option has the highest land use footprint and land use impacts. The monitory value of the land use impacts from implementing utility scale ground mounted systems depends primarily on the type of associated ecosystems and the value people place on them. For the rooftop option in this case study to be preferred to the ground mounted option, the value of land use impacts would have to increase significantly.