In the paper, the team focuses on the two dominant deployed photovoltaic (PV) technologies: silicon (Si) and cadmium telluride (CdTe) PV.
These green technologies help reduce carbon emissions and meet global decarbonization goals—but their manufacturing processes can themselves result in greenhouse gas emissions.
To understand the overall impact of these green technologies on global decarbonization goals, the team looked beyond traditional metrics like cost, performance, and reliability. They evaluated “embodied” energy and carbon—the sunk energy and carbon emissions involved in manufacturing a PV module—as well as the energy payback time .
“One of the unique things that was done in this paper is that the manufacturing and science perspectives were brought together,” Samantha Reese said. “We combined life-cycle analysis with materials science to explain the emission results for each technology and to examine effects of future advances. We want to use these results to identify areas where additional research is needed.”
This insight matters because of the limited carbon budget available to support the expected scale of PV manufacturing in the coming decades.goals set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as much as a sixth of the remaining carbon budget could be used to manufacture PV modules,” Matthew Reese said. “That’s the scale of the problem—it’s a massive amount of manufacturing that has to be done in order to replace the energy sources being used today.
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