Forecasting meteorological impacts on the environmental sustainability of a large-scale solar plant via artificial intelligence-based life cycle assessment

Abstract

Although large-scale solar (LSS) is a promising renewable energy technology, it causes adverse impacts on the ecosystem, human health, and resource depletion throughout its upstream (i.e., raw material extraction to solar panel production) and downstream (i.e., plant demolition and waste management) processes. The LSS operational performance also fluctuates due to meteorological conditions, leading to uncertainty in electricity generation and raising concerns about its overall environmental performance. Hitherto, there has been no evidence-backed study that evaluates the ecological sustainability of LSS with the consideration of meteorological uncertainties. In this study, a novel integrated Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) framework is developed to forecast the meteorological impacts on LSS's electricity generation and its life cycle environmental sustainability. For LCA, 18 impact categories and three damage categories are characterised and assessed by ReCiPe 2016 via SimaPro v. 9.1. For ANN, a feedforward neural network is applied via Neural Designer 5.9.3. Taking an LSS plant in Malaysia as a case study, the photovoltaic panel production stage contributes the highest environmental impact in LSS (30 % of human health, 30 % of ecosystem quality, and 34 % of resource scarcity). Aluminium recycling reduces by 10 % for human health, 10 % for ecosystem quality, and 9 % for resource scarcity. The emissions avoided by the forecasted LSS-generated electricity offset the environmental burden for human health, ecosystem quality, and resource scarcity 12–68 times, 13–73 times, and 18–98 times, respectively. The developed ANN-LCA framework can provide LSS stakeholders with data-backed insights to effectively design an environmentally conscious LSS facility, considering meteorological influences.