Publication date: 17th February 2025
Cost-efficient climate change mitigation requires the continued rapid expansion of the photovoltaic (PV) system production to the multi-TW level. The PV industry is currently transforming into a key industry sector, which implies that sustainability aspects will have increasingly wide-ranging impacts. We identify four paradigm shifts that can enable a sustainable TW-scale transformation and that address power conversion efficiency, materials, circularity, and social aspects. It will be discussed if and how these can be accomplished with state-of-the-art silicon-based PV technologies and which transformative potential is offered by novel perovskite PV technologies:
A change to highly efficient multijunction architectures can reduce materials consumption but implies higher materials complexity. By replacing fossil fuel-based technologies and also by switching from wafer-based to thin film technologies, PV will reduce global mining activities but may create new supply risks and resource complexities (Fig. 1a). Although end-of-life material streams lag behind PV production by several decades, material circularity needs to be anticipated already in the R&D stage to manage huge future waste streams efficiently. Finally, social aspects especially during production but also in serving all humanities energy needs are an integral part of sustainability and are essential for a wide acceptance of the technology.
In the temporal scale, these sustainability challenges fall into two distinct phases (Fig. 1b): a first phase, until mid-century, when rapid PV capacity expansion to mitigate climate change needs to be the main focus, and a second phase where material circularity will become critical. These phases need to be understood and addressed in a multi-dimensional, path dependent optimization approach. Thereby perovskite PV can play a pivotal role to achieve optimum sustainable yield for multi-TW scale photovoltaics.
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