Naples Airport put 270 solar panels on a new warehouse roof, and the payback period being quoted for it counts government rebates as well as energy savings

The City of Naples Airport Authority has installed 270 solar panels on the roof of a newly built warehouse storage building near the North Road Terminal and Fuel Farm, and says the system will be fully operational later this summer.

The cost is $249,665 and the projected payback period is 5.7 years, reported by Elizabeth King at Business Observer on Thursday and attributed there to an airport spokesperson. The Business Observer account is specific about what the period measures. It describes the payback as the time taken to recoup costs through energy savings and government rebates.

The airport's own announcement, posted to flynaples.com on Thursday and linked below, contains neither figure. It gives no cost, no payback period and no annual output in kilowatt hours.

Gulf Coast News published its own account on Saturday, by Layza Pinero Resto, and put the cost at just under $250,000 with the airport expecting to recoup the whole expense through energy savings within six years. That is a narrower description of the same recovery than the one the spokesperson gave Business Observer, which counts rebates alongside the savings.

What the release does supply is the engineering and the permissions. The system will produce approximately 100 kilowatts of AC-generating capacity, in the authority's own wording. PayOli Energy, which is based in Miami, designed and installed the array. Owen-Ames-Kimball, headquartered in Michigan with offices in Naples and Fort Myers, was general contractor on the building underneath it. The mounting is non-penetrating, which the authority says preserves the roof warranty.

The regulatory step is in the release as well. The authority's board approved an interconnection agreement with Florida Power and Light earlier this year, which the release states is required by the Florida Public Service Commission for self-generating utility customers.

Chris Rozansky, executive director of the authority, is quoted in the release on cost and environment together, saying that the savings are substantial and the environmental effect greater still. He gave Gulf Coast News a separate line on storms, saying it is critically important that airport staff and equipment can be stored safely and be ready to go immediately after one. That quote does not appear in the release.

A ribbon cutting was held on Friday. The authority describes the ceremony as marking substantial completion of construction, which is a narrower claim than completion, and it is consistent with a system that is installed but not yet running.

Two things are missing from all three accounts, and they are the two a reader would need to test the payback. There is no figure for annual output in kilowatt hours, and there is no rate at which that output is valued. A payback period is the quotient of those two against the capital cost. Published as it stands, the 5.7 years can be reported but not checked.

The capacity figure itself is stated by both the authority and Business Observer as roughly 100 kilowatts of AC-generating capacity per day. A kilowatt measures power rather than a daily quantity of energy, and this brief reports the wording as the authority published it rather than converting it into a figure the authority did not give.