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2010
Conference Paper
Titel
Update of the environmental indicators and energy payback time (EPBT) of CIS modules in Europe and scenario analysis of solar cell printing
Abstract
The production capacity of photovoltaic industries increased considerably in the last years. In terms of thin film PV modules, a market share of around 30% is forecasted to be reached by 2015. Worldwide measures to increase the production capacities of photovoltaic manufacturers are recognized. One way of increasing production capacities is to develop new production technologies like the printing of solar cells. By replacing the energy intensive physical vapour deposition with atmospheric printing technologies a higher output and yield should be reached and therefore decreasing production costs. Together with increased production efficiency also the environmental profile and indicators change. Therefore, especially for the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of product systems with short development cycles, the environmental profiles need to be updated frequently according to current industry data to ensure the representativeness and validity of the environmental assessment. In addition, a LCA study accompanying the process of product development supports the identification of potential environmental improvements and weak points, thus possible measures for further improvement can be applied in the early stage of the design process. For this reason, a LCA study is carried out at the Chair of Building Physics (LBP) in cooperation with Würth Solar to analyse the environmental improvement potential of different processing options of the CIS module production to further improve the environmental performance of CIS modules and hence the CIS power generation. The paper gives an overview of the approach of the study, discusses the main outcomes and analyses the significance of process technologies in relation to the environmental profile of the production of CIS modules.
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