Evaluating the Environmental Performance of Solar Energy Systems Through a Combined Life Cycle Assessment and Cost Analysis

Abstract

The paper presents a holistic evaluation of the energy and environmental profile of two renewable energy technologies: Photovoltaics (thin-film and crystalline) and solar thermal collectors (flat plate and vacuum tube). The selected renewable systems exhibit size scalability (i.e., photovoltaics can vary from small to large scale applications) and can easily fit to residential applications (i.e., solar thermal systems). Various technical variations were considered for each of the studied technologies. The environmental implications were assessed through detailed life cycle assessment (LCA), implemented from raw material extraction through manufacture, use, and end of life of the selected energy systems. The methodological order followed comprises two steps: i. LCA and uncertainty analysis (conducted via SimaPro), and ii. techno-economic assessment (conducted via RETScreen). All studied technologies exhibit environmental impacts during their production phase and through their operation they manage to mitigate significant amounts of emitted greenhouse gases due to the avoided use of fossil fuels. The life cycle carbon footprint was calculated for the studied solar systems and was compared to other energy production technologies (either renewables or fossil-fuel based) and the results fall within the range defined by the global literature. The study showed that the implementation of photovoltaics and solar thermal projects in areas with high average insolation (i.e., Crete, Southern Greece) can be financially viable even in the case of low feed-in-tariffs. The results of the combined evaluation provide insight on choosing the most appropriate technologies from multiple perspectives, including financial and environmental.

The Role of Earth Observation Satellites in Maximizing Renewable Energy Production: Case Studies Analysis for Renewable Power Plants

“…It is built to maximize the size of an integrated hybrid energy system in buildings. Case studies for a single and an integrated renewable energy program may research the efficiency of the methods [39]. Another example of using RETScreen is to provide a techno-economic assessment of a certain type of renewable energy installation only after evaluating the environmental consequences of the selected energy systems through comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) with a more accurate tool [40].…”

Autonomous Installations for Monitoring the “Protector Prosperina“ Forest

“…The evaluation of data transmission capacity and operation time was made based on the supplied elements such as [18]. Second stage; Enabling the cellular network of the devices or modules that capture data [19]. Finally, the devices were located in strategic sites for data collection within the study area, during this phase, the protections of the boxes were designed and they installed the information acquisition systems (Figure 3).…”

Life Cycle Assessment of the Use of Phase Change Material in an Evacuated Solar Tube Collector

“…Whereas, there are few studies that examine the ecological aspect of solar systems based on the vacuum tube technology. There are studies that investigate the life cycle of solar collectors; however, the majority of them are based on Embodied Energy (EE) and Embodied Carbon (EC) along with USEtox and Ecological Footprint (EF), or life cycle cost analysis [16,18,20,27,28,54,63,65,68,73,[75][76][77]. Few studies consider the LCA methodology for a perspective based on actual pollutant for impact assessment individually with a single score [59,78,79].…”