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Prioritizing circular economy strategies for photovoltaics in the energy transition
Mirletz, Heather M.
Mirletz, Heather M.
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2023
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Abstract
Photovoltaic (PV) deployment for energy transition and decarbonization necessitates an unprecedented scale-up to 75 TW globally by 2050. Multi-TW scale deployment poses significant challenges, including the large quantity of required materials. Material extraction entails environmental impacts, and fears abound that end-of-life modules will result in environmental degradation. Circular Economy (CE)—a broad system framework that maintains material value through R-actions (i.e., reduce, reuse, recycle) to promote sustainable development and improve environmental quality—is proposed to enhance PV sustainability for multi-TW deployment. However, no one has quantified the impacts of applying CE to PV in the energy transition context, and proposed solutions focus heavily on recycling, the last recourse of the ranked R-actions.
This thesis quantifies and compares the virgin material demands, lifecycle wastes, energy demands, net energy, energy balance, and cumulative carbon emissions of different R-actions for PV while achieving energy transition. An open-source, system-dynamics model (PV ICE) was created to address the lack of data-based decision support tools and multi-metric quantification, enabling exploration of PV supply chains with varying degrees and types of circularity, leveraging updated reliability data and field-relevant end-of-life modes. This work also contributes open-source baselines capturing the historical and expected future crystalline silicon PV module designs, and their associated material supply chains with process-specific and market-share weightings.
Analyses demonstrated that deploying long-lived modules reduces mass, energy, and carbon impacts while material circularity alone cannot minimize impacts. PV recycling can help the future decarbonization of supply chains; the magnitude of the end-of-life material will be well within our capabilities to manage responsibly, and there is time to plan proactively. Ultimately, near-term efforts to reduce the environmental impacts of PV deployment should focus on improving module lifetimes and efficiencies, and on alternate material sourcing. None of these endeavors should impede the deployment required for energy transition.
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