Industrial symbiosis of very large-scale photovoltaic manufacturing

Abstract

In order to stabilize the global climate the world's governments must make significant commitments to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. One of the most promising methods of curbing GHG emissions is a world transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. Solar photovoltaic (PV) cells offer a technically sustainable solution to the projected enormous future energy demands. This article explores utilizing industrial symbiosis to obtain economies of scale and increased manufacturing efficiencies for solar photovoltaic cells in order for solar electricity to compete economically with fossil fuel-fired electricity. The state of PV manufacturing, the market and the effects of scale on both are reviewed. Government policies necessary to construct a multi-gigaWatt PV factory and complimentary policies to protect existing solar companies are outlined and the technical requirements for a symbiotic industrial system are explored to increase the manufacturing efficiency while improving the environmental impact of PV. The results of the analysis show that an 8-factory industrial symbiotic system can be viewed as a medium-term investment by any government, which will not only obtain direct financial return, but also an improved global environment. The technical concepts and policy limitations to this approach were analyzed and it was found that symbiotic growth will help to mitigate many of the limitations of PV and is likely to catalyze mass manufacturing of PV by transparently demonstrating that large scale PV manufacturing is technically feasible and reaches an enormous untapped market for PV with low costs.

Reversing the Trend of Large Scale and Centralization in Manufacturing: The Case of Distributed Manufacturing of Customizable 3-D-Printable Self-Adjustable Glasses

“…The benefits of large-scale manufacturing (or flow production) are well established and include reduction in costs due to the economies of scale from: i) bulk purchasing of materials, supplies, and components through long-term contracts; ii) technological advantages of returns to scale in the production function, such as lower embodied energy during manufacturing of a given product because of scale; iii) favorable financing in terms of interest, access to capital and a variety of financial instruments; iv) marketing and v) increased specialization of employees and managers [4][5][6]. These advantages have created a general trend towards large-scale manufacturing in low-labor cost countries, especially for inexpensive plastic products [7,8].…”

The Benefits of Sharing—Nice Guys and Girls do Finish First

“…However, it is important to understand how this type of collaboration among firms has enormous economic benefits. To illustrate this point on a smaller ecoindustrial system, consider a multi-Gigawatt solar PV factory at the center of a next generation ecoindustrial park made up of eight symbiotic factories as seen schematically in Figure 2.4 [27].…”

“…The raw glass from the recycling plant is fed to a sheet glass factory (2), which outputs cut sheets of 3-mm-thick glass with seamed edges, which provides both substrates and potentially back cladding for the PV. Finally, the glass is tempered for mechanical strength and the front side is coated with a transparent conductor such as tin oxide, zinc oxide, or indium tin oxide to be used as thin-film PV substrates [27]. The potential symbiosis of colocating the glass plant (2) and the PV plant (4) while using recycled glass is shown in Figure 2.5.…”

Utilization of Virtual Globes for Open Source Industrial Symbiosis

“…The strategic co-location of facilities with complementary input/output needs can provide an economic advantage to businesses and help drive down the costs of renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic cells [4,19]. The use of Google Earth to identify potential matches within existing industries could be further used by economic development groups to attract new businesses to the area based on available waste streams that could become inputs for the new businesses.…”