LCA of Perovskite on Si Tandem PV Modules at Industrial Scale
| Autor: | Salas Redondo, C., Blanco, C.F., Alvino, K., Peijnenburg, W.J.G.M., Oberbeck, L. |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: | |
| DOI: | 10.4229/eupvsec20202020-3bv.2.101 |
| Popis: | 37th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition; 754-764 For the first time a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) is reported of a large-area perovskite/Si tandem photovoltaic (PV) module of about 2 m², with an assumed power conversion efficiency of 30%, 30 years lifetime and an annual degradation of 0.5%, manufactured in a 1 GW production plant. By means of the LCA method, we calculate the contribution to the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) impact categories associated with a perovskite/Si tandem PV system compared with a passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC) used as reference, considering a functional unit of 1 kWh of generated direct current electrical energy from the tandem module over its lifetime. It was found that the most significant hotspots are the silicon wafer production and the slanted-roof installation (mounting system, inverter, and electric installation). Overall, the impact contributions to the environment caused by the perovskite sub-module are below 1% throughout all the ILCD categories in focus, i.e. climate change, freshwater ecotoxicity, water resource depletion and human toxicity. Even the contribution of lead to human toxicity is just about 0.01%. For all the impacts assessed, the perovskite/Si tandem shows a decrease of between 17-20% of the contributions to each impact category compared to the PERC-module based reference PV system, if the Si bottom submodule has an initial cell efficiency of at least 22% with 1% cell-to-module (CTM) loss, and the perovskite top submodule has a minimum initial cell efficiency of 18% with at most 5% CTM loss, transmittance near IR region larger than 80% and at most 10% annual transmittance loss. The key result found in this work is the relevance of the performance and reliability of the PV system to achieve lower environmental impacts. A comparison between optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic scenarios was performed to tackle this matter: in the worst-case scenario, the environmental impact of the PV tandem system would have a general 50% increase throughout all ILCD impact categories against the realistic case, whereas in the optimistic scenario, the results suggest a reduction of 46% to the global impact contributions, compared to the realistic scenario. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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