Sustainability strategies for PV: framework, status and needs

Gervais, Estelle; Herceg, Sina; Nold, S.; Weiß, Karl-Anders

doi:10.1051/epjpv/2021005

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Large deployment of PV installations over the past decade has raised concerns about the environmental impacts of its production and final disposal. Since PV is related to the delivery of renewable 'green' energy, customers have very high expectations for the sustainability of the technology [26,27].…”

Section: Sustainability and Legal Regulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motivation, benefits, and challenges for new photovoltaic material & module developments

Stein

Eder²,

Berger

et al. 2022

Prog. Energy

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In the last decade and longer, photovoltaic module manufacturers have experienced a rapidly growing market along with a dramatic decrease in module prices. Such cost pressures have resulted in a drive to develop and implement new module designs, which either increase performance and/or lifetime of the modules or decrease the cost to produce them. In this paper, the main motivations and benefits but also challenges for material innovations will be discussed. Many of these innovations include the use of new and novel materials in place of more conventional materials or designs. As a result, modules are being produced and sold without a long-term understanding about the performance and reliability of these new materials. This has lead to unexpected new failure mechanisms occuring few years after deployment, such as Potential Induced Degradation or backsheet cracking. None of these failure modes have been detected after the back then common single stress tests. New accelerated test approaches are based on a combination or sequence of multiple stressors that better reflect outdoor conditions. That allows for identification of new degradation modes linked to new module materials or module designs.

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Section: Sustainability and Legal Regulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motivation, benefits, and challenges for new photovoltaic material & module developments

Stein

Eder²,

Berger

et al. 2022

Prog. Energy

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“…At the same time, this growth entails an increase in the consumption of resources for production and the consequent environmental impacts. As such, sustainable pathways for manufacturing products along the PV value chain are of high relevance to minimize those impacts for the expected terawatt-scale deployment of PV [2][3][4][5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Photovoltaic Manufacturing Factories and Industrial Site Environmental Impact Assessment

Brailovsky,

Sanchez,

Subasi

et al. 2024

Energies

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Life cycle inventories (LCIs) and life cycle assessments (LCAs) of photovoltaic (PV) modules and their components focus on the operations of PV factories, but the factories and industrial site product and construction stages are either not or only partially tackled. This work contributes through the bottom-up, model-based generation of LCIs and LCAs for setting up a vertically integrated 5 GWp/a PV industrial site, including the manufacturing of silicon ingots, wafers, solar cells, and PV modules, on a 50 ha greenfield location. Two comparative LCAs are performed. The first compares the annualized environmental impacts of the developed LCI sets with four existing inventories in the Ecoinvent v3.8 database. The second comparative LCA explores the environmental impact differences concerning the industrial site when using different building systems for the factories. Here, the reference system with a steel structure is compared with two alternative building systems: precast concrete and structural timber. The results show that the wafer, cell, and module factories’ annualized environmental impacts with the Ecoinvent LCIs are strongly overestimated. For the ingot factory, the opposite result is identified. The impacts of all four factories show reductions of between 11.7% and 94.3% for 14 of the 15 impact categories. High mean environmental impact shares of 79.0%, 78.2% and 79.2% for the steel, precast concrete and timber structural building systems, respectively, are generated at the product stage. The process and facilities equipment generates 54.2%, 54.4% and 58.2% of the total product and construction stages’ mean environmental impact shares. The proposed alternative timber building system reduces the environmental impacts in 14 of the 15 evaluated categories, with reductions ranging from 1.1% to 12.4%.

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“…R-actions are aimed at further improving product sustainability. Definitions of sustainability include low material and energy demands, low environmental impacts, low toxicity, low carbon, low waste, eco-efficient, and providing socio-economic benefits, and different stakeholders emphasize different priorities [10,[21][22][23]. As such, proposed R-actions have identified varying priorities including high-yield, high-efficiency paradigms, short-lived but fully recyclable module designs, and long-lasting, reliable, durable modules [24][25][26].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prioritizing circular economy strategies for sustainable PV deployment at the TW scale

Mirletz,

Ovaitt,

Sridhar

et al. 2024

EPJ Photovolt.

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Global decarbonization requires an unprecedented scale-up of photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing and deployment. The material demand and eventual end of life management associated with multi-TW scale deployment poses many challenges. Circular Economy (CE) and it's associated R-Actions (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) have been proposed to mitigate end of life management and material sourcing concerns. However, CE metrics typically focus on a single product and only consider mass, excluding energy flows. This work leverages the PV in Circular Economy (PV ICE) tool to quantify the deployment, mass, and energy impacts of R-Actions and proposed sustainable PV designs in the context of achieving energy transition deployment goals (75 TW in 2050). 13 module scenarios are established and evaluated across 6 capacity, mass and energy metrics to identify tradeoffs and priorities. We find that increasing module efficiency can reduce near-term material demands up to 30% and improve energy metrics by up to 9%. Material circularity (recycling) can minimize lifecycle wastes and reduce material demands at the cost of higher energy demands. Increasing module lifetime, including reliability improvements and reuse strategies, is effective at reducing both material (>10%) and energy demands (24%). Uniquely, lifetime improvements maximize benefits and minimize the harms across all six metrics while achieving multi-TW scale deployment.

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Sustainability strategies for PV: framework, status and needs

Cited by 12 publications

References 20 publications

Motivation, benefits, and challenges for new photovoltaic material & module developments

Motivation, benefits, and challenges for new photovoltaic material & module developments

Photovoltaic Manufacturing Factories and Industrial Site Environmental Impact Assessment

Prioritizing circular economy strategies for sustainable PV deployment at the TW scale

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