Emerging Photovoltaic (PV) Materials for a Low Carbon Economy

Ilke Celik,Zhaoning Song,Ramez Hosseinian Ahangharnejhad,Michael Heben,Defne Apul

doi:10.3390/en13164131

Abstract

Emerging photovoltaic (PV) technologies have a potential to address the shortcomings of today’s energy market which heavily depends on the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation. We created inventories that offer insights into the environmental impacts and cost of all the materials used in emerging PV technologies, including perovskites, polymers, Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS), carbon nanotubes (CNT), and quantum dots. The results show that the CO2 emissions associated with the absorber layers are much less than the CO2 emissions associated with the contact and charge selective layers. The CdS (charge selective layer) and ITO (contact layer) have the highest environmental impacts compared to Al2O3, CuI, CuSCN, MoO3, NiO, poly (3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl (P3HT)), phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM), poly polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS), SnO2, spiro-OMeTAD, and TiO2 (charge selective layers) and Al, Ag, Cu, FTO, Mo, ZnO:In, and ZnO/ZnO:Al (contact layers). The cost assessments show that the organic materials, such as polymer absorbers, CNT, P3HT and spiro-OMeTAD, are the most expensive materials. Inorganic materials would be more preferable to lower the cost of solar cells. All the remaining materials have a potential to be used in the commercial PV market. Finally, we analyzed the cost of PV materials based on their material intensity and CO2 emissions, and concluded that the perovskite absorber will be the most eco-efficient material that has the lowest cost and CO2 emissions.

Highlights

Todays’ global power consumption is ~6 TW [1] and is expected to triple to 18 TW [2,3] by 2050, with a projected increase in the global energy demand of 1.1 GW/day from 2020 and 2050
The global installed capacity of solar PV is about 480 GW [7] with >90% of this capacity utilizing wafer-based crystalline silicon (c-Si) technology. c-Si technology is fabricated on on semiconducting wafers and can be built without an additional substrate, modules are semiconducting wafers and can be built without an additional substrate, modules are typically covered with glass for mechanical stability and protection [8,9] and 8 to 9% of the solar PV
We created a large set of inventories that offer insights into the environmental impacts and cost of all the materials used in emerging PV technologies, using consistent assumptions for commercial scale manufacturing

Summary

Introduction

Todays’ global power consumption is ~6 TW [1] and is expected to triple to 18 TW [2,3] by 2050, with a projected increase in the global energy demand of 1.1 GW/day from 2020 and 2050 To meet this challenge, an average nuclear power plant would need to build each day of the 30 years (globally) [4] at the cost of 1.6 to 2.7 billion USD each day [5]. There is a limitation of the large scale global market penetration of glass, plastic, or metal substrate. There is a limitation of the large scale global market penetration of these technologies due to production costs, material availability, and slow manufacturing [4,11]

Methods

Results

Conclusion