Environmental Impacts of Photovoltaic Life Cycles

Assessments of the environmental impacts of energy generation and storage technologies are essential in evaluating their sustainability. Life-cycle assessment is a fundamental tool for investigating the environmental profile of energy technologies describing, in detail, material and energy flows and emissions into the environment that may occur at each life stage (e.g., mining of materials, processing and their purification, manufacturing, installation, operation, decommissioning, and disposal or recycling). In this chapter, we describe the environmental footprint as well as the energy demand, energy pay-back-time (EPBT), and energy return on investment (EROI) of commercial photovoltaic technologies, thus single-crystalline silicon (sc-Si), multi-crystalline silicon (mc-Si), cadmium telluride (CdTe), and copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), ground-mount, latitude-tilt PV systems. In addition, we provide preliminary estimates for emerging single-junction perovskite solar cell (PSC) systems.