Except you don't, you just see limited installations here and there.
If solar power has such a quick payback period why aren't more investment groups funding it?
Are the panels not available in sufficient quantity?
Global installations for 2016 are also on track to set a new record, surpassing 2015 installations by 48%: https://cleantechnica.com/2016/11/30/global-solar-installati...
And despite these records, the manufacturing side of the industry is currently demand-constrained rather than supply-constrained.
When you say you there's just "limited installations here and there," are you estimating from whatever you personally see in your local area?
Also, global solar is going up like crazy. Global sustained growth rate of around 40% is crazy fast. If that keeps on for a bit more than ten years, 100% of current global electricity demand is covered by solar. Just for comparison, there exists no two subsequent full years of iPhone production where Apple would have managed to achieve 100% growth.
I think his numbers didn't take into consideration the expensive backup power plant that you have to have ready even if you have adequate solar capacity.
Energy pay-back time (EPBT) results for fixed-tilt ground mounted installations range from 0.5 years for CdTe PV at high-irradiation (2300 kWh/(m^2·yr)) to 2.8 years for sc-Si PV at low-irradiation (1000 kWh/(m^2·yr)), with corresponding quality-adjusted energy return on investment (EROIPE-eq) values ranging from over 60 to ~10.
If you want to see other publications on the same topic, try hitting Google Scholar with search terms "photovoltaic" "life cycle" "energy payback". For the most accurate results, restrict your search to recent years. Manufacturing processes are revised rapidly and studies from the turn of the millennium are now badly obsolete. (Though even in 1990 PV systems were net energy positive on average; the worry that PV system manufacturing consumes more energy than the lifetime output appears to be a holdover from the very early (1970s) days of terrestrial PV systems.)