Ex-ante economic and environmental analysis of manufacturing emerging thin-film photovoltaics

Abstract

In recent decades, advancements in solar energy and photovoltaic (PV) technologies have driven shifts in countries’ energy mixes. Consequently, policymakers and scholars regard solar energy as an essential source to achieve the energy transition goals from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and mitigate the effects of climate change. This thesis revolves around evaluating emerging PV technologies, focusing on their environmental and economic impact. Previous empirical studies have attempted to estimate either emerging PV technologies' economic or environmental performance. As these were conducted separately, a holistic assessment of the developed technologies' economic and environmental aspects is missing. This could hinder the identification of any potential trade-offs between these aspects throughout the technology’s lifecycle. Moreover, these evaluations lacked a comprehensive analysis that involved a wide range of traditional single-junction (SJ) and novel tandem PV technologies to obtain a harmonized analysis. In addition, regional differences were not considered along with a long-term perspective, including technological advancements, cost reductions resulting from learning effects, and shifts in countries’ energy mixes. These factors could significantly affect the economic and environmental impact performance of PV devices manufactured in specific regions. This thesis seeks to address the limitations of previous research by integrating environmental and economic assessments while promoting methods to improve the impact assessment framework. This dissertation contributes to a better empirical understanding of economic and environmental impact aspects of emerging PV technologies. Firstly, the current solar energy context and PV technologies, along with the economic and environmental impact studies that have focused on emerging PV technologies, are outlined in the introduction. The following chapters address the research goals of the thesis by (1) integrating economic and environmental impact assessment to PV evaluation throughout the lifecycle, (2) quantifying regional and systemic aspects of emerging tandem PV technologies, and (3) proposing innovative methods to bridge the gaps between experimental phase and impact assessments by linking modeling parameters to experimental process conditions and impact assessment. Overall, this dissertation provides insights into the potential of emerging PV technologies and offers a framework for assessing their economic and environmental impact, ultimately contributing to the accelerated progress of PV technologies and the harmonization of technical, economic, and environmental factors in evaluating emerging PV technologies. Finally, the last chapter provides overarching conclusions, recommendations, and routes for possible future research. This thesis finds evidence that alternative thin-film tandem PV technologies can compete with traditional silicon-based PVs and emerging perovskite/silicon tandems regarding economic and environmental impact under similar lifetime conditions of commercially available PV technologies and if high power conversion efficiency is retained when upscaling to large-area PV devices. This may be relevant for regions seeking to promote domestic PV manufacturing and expanding solar energy deployment while diversifying the PV supply chain and decreasing the carbon footprint impact of the PV industry. This dissertation finally demonstrates the benefits related to the integration of machine learning methods into economic and environmental impact assessments to bridge the gap between the experimental phases of technology development and impact assessments with the final goal of optimizing key performance metrics by varying experimental process conditions.