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Shaping and channeling the transformation of the global energy system require an understanding of the life cycle environmental impacts of available technology options. With photovoltaic electricity generation expected to be the largest, least cost, and most relevant source of energy globally by mid-century, the environmental and resource implications of this technology should be made accessible to a variety of societal, political, and scientific stakeholders. The ProductEnvironmental Footprint Guide provides a methodology for assessing the environmental impacts of PV technologies based on life cycle assessment. The establishment of an inclusive multi-stakeholder process with multiple checkpoints, ensuring scientific soundness, societal and political acceptance and methodological quality, is portrayed in this paper and can serve as a model for driving a single market for green products in the EU.

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International audienceSolar photovoltaics (PV) is the second largest source of new capacity among renewable energies. The worldwide capacity encompassed 135GW in 2013 and is estimated to increase to 1721GW in 2030 and 4674GW in 2050, according to a prospective high-renewable scenario. To achieve this production level while minimizing environmental impacts, decision makers must have access to environmental performance data that reflect their high spatial variability accurately. We propose ENVI-PV (http://viewer.webservice-energy.org/project_iea), a new interactive tool that provides maps and screening level data, based on weighted average supply chains, for the environmental performance of common PV technologies. Environmental impacts of PV systems are evaluated according to a life cycle assessment approach. ENVI-PV was developed using a state-of-the-art interoperable and open standard Web Service framework from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). It combines the latest life cycle inventories, published in 2015 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) under the Photovoltaic Power Systems Program (PVPS) Task 12, and some inventories previously published from Ecoinvent v2.2 database with solar irradiation estimates computed from the worldwide NASA SSE database. ENVI-PV is the first tool to propose a worldwide coverage of environmental performance of PV systems using a multi-criteria assessment. The user can compare the PV environmental performance to the environmental footprint of country electricity mixes. ENVI-PV is designed as an environmental interactive tool to generate PV technological options and evaluate their performance in different spatial and techno-economic contexts. Its potential applications are illustrated in this paper with several examples