Environmental Impacts of Photovoltaic Life Cycles

Assessments of the environmental impacts of energy generation and storage technologies are essential in evaluating their sustainability. Life-cycle assessment is a well-accepted tool for investigating the environmental profile of energy technologies describing, in detail, material and energy flows and emissions into the environment that may occur at each life stage (e.g., mining of materials, processing and their purification, manufacturing, installation, operation, decommissioning, and disposal or recycling). In this chapter, we describe the environmental footprint of three commercial photovoltaic technologies, that is, monocrystalline silicon, multicrystalline silicon, and cadmium telluride, mounted on flat, fixed ground-mounted systems. In addition to environmental metrics, we quantify life-cycle risk indicators (i.e., fatalities, injuries, and maximum consequences) in a comparative context with other electricity generation pathways.

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