Greenhouse gas emissions related to fires in photovoltaic installations

Abstract

Life cycle assessments, LCA, can be made on all types of materials and products where the total environmental impact of the production, use and end-of-life is quantified. By including fire as one potential end-of-life scenario, the emissions related to these, and potential benefits from reducing the risk of fire can be quantified. The question addressed in this article is how fires in photovoltaic (PV) installations affect the environmental impact in a life cycle perspective. This will be evaluated by using a methodology called Fire-LCA that is based on standard LCA according to ISO 14040. The total emissions from PV-related fires in buildings and the emissions related to rebuilding and replacing the damaged materials normalised over the amounts of produced electric energy are calculated to 0.3 g CO2eq/kWh. This is two orders of magnitude lower than the typical 43.6 g CO2eq/kWh for the normal life cycle of PV installations. This comparison puts the environmental impact of PV-related fires in perspective and underlines that PV installations still make a large positive impact on the reduction of CO2eq-emissions from electricity production even though they represent a certain fire hazard.