Energy consumption and carbon footprint of perovskite solar cells

Abstract

Recently, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) emerged and promise to break the prevailing solar energy paradigm by combining both low-cost and high-efficiency. PSC technology actually shivered the solar photovoltaic (PV) community as a strong candidate to rival the efficiency of traditional PV devices; in less than 12 years its efficiency was improved from 3.8% to almost 26%. Despite the tremendous and successful effort for obtaining PSC devices with high power conversion efficiencies, little efforts have been devoted to study fundamental engineering aspects essential for future industrial production. In particular, this work makes an analysis of the energy consumed and the carbon footprint of producing a 3-mesoscopic PSC 8 x 8 cm(2) module with an 8.7% efficiency in a life cycle perspective. A cradle-to-gate study was performed, using as much as possible primary data. Considering the PSC module as the functional unit the results show that the mesoporous layer deposition is the dominant term concerning the energy consumption. Regarding the carbon footprint, the gold layer, in particular gold, is the main factor. Changing the electricity source to renewable photovoltaic energy reduces significantly the carbon footprint. The results stress the need to replace gold, and use less severe operational conditions in the module production. (C) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.