Climate-Economic Mismatch in Photovoltaic Valuation Across Regional Electricity Groupings

Photovoltaic (PV) deployment is expanding rapidly, but the climate and economic value of identical generation varies with electricity-system and market conditions. This study examines whether avoided-emission rankings align with project-level financial valuation when physical project characteristics are held constant. A documented 1.101 MWp PV project, with expected annual generation of 1592.6 MWh/year, was assessed counterfactually across seven regional electricity groupings, with Brazil as the reference case. The framework integrates generation-weighted emission factors, avoided-emission accounting, discounted cash flow, carbon-abatement costs, deterministic sensitivity analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, and exploratory Pearson and Spearman correlations with exact permutation inference. To address the physical variability of the reference asset, an auxiliary hourly PV simulation covering ten complete years (2016–2025) was additionally performed using solar irradiance, ambient temperature, and wind-speed data. The modeled annual generation averaged 1472.4 MWh/year, with a coefficient of variation of 1.44%, indicating limited interannual variability over the evaluated decade. Financial indicators were evaluated over a 20-year horizon, whereas lifetime avoided emissions and carbon-abatement costs were assessed over a 25-year technical lifetime. The Arab League presented the highest avoided emissions (1005 tCO2/year; 6.1 times Brazil) but the weakest base-case financial result: a net abatement cost of approximately USD 7/tCO2 and a 70.1% probability of positive NPV. The European Union achieved the highest NPV, a net abatement cost of approximately −USD 255/tCO2, and a 100% probability of positive NPV despite lower mitigation. An inverse association between emission factor and electricity tariff further characterized this mismatch (Spearman’s ρ=−0.786; exact permutation p=0.048). The results show that physical PV production, mitigation potential, and project-level financial valuation represent distinct but complementary dimensions that should be assessed jointly when comparing PV deployment contexts.