A Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of PV Modules – Influence of Database and Background System

Held, Michael; Dannenberg, T.; Brailovsky, P.; Fischer, Martin J.; Briem, Ann-Kathrin; Herceg, S.

doi:10.4229/eupvsec20212021-4do.11.2

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“…In sector-specific LCA studies of PV module production, the infrastructure components have been identified as important sources of impacts for the categories Land use and Resource use, minerals and metals [8,35]; however, the specific impact quantities were not disclosed. Herceg et al (2021) reported that infrastructure components are not considered in the GaBi database [35], which represents a critical underestimation of the environmental impacts when using this database in comparison to the Ecoinvent one. Nevertheless, the results presented in this work show that the environmental impacts of infrastructure are also underestimated for the ingot factory, and overestimated for the wafer, cell and module factories, when using the Ecoinvent datasets.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

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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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%