Solar Energy Payback Times for Photovoltaic Technologies

Energy payback time (EPBT) is the length of deployment required for a photovoltaic system to generate an amount of energy equal to the total energy that went into its production. Roof-mounted photovoltaic systems have impressively low energy payback times, as documented by recent (year 2004) engineering studies. The value of EPBT is dependent on three factors: (i) the conversion efficiency of the photovoltaic system; (ii) the amount of illumination (insolation) that the system receives (about 1700 kWh/m²/yr average for southern Europe and about 1800 kWh/m²/yr average for the United States); and (iii) the manufacturing technology that was used to make the photovoltaic (solar) cells.

With respect to the third factor, i.e., manufacturing technology, there are three generic approaches for manufacturing commercial solar cells. The most common approach is to process discrete cells on wafers sawed from silicon ingots. Ingots can be either single-crystal or multicrystalline. However, in either case, the growing and sawing of ingots is a highly energy intensive process. A more recent approach which saves energy is to process discrete cells on silicon wafers cut from multicrystalline ribbons. The third approach involves the deposition of thin layers of non-crystalline-silicon materials on inexpensive substrates. It is the least energy intensive of the three generic manufacturing approaches for commercial photovoltaics. This last group of technologies includes amorphous silicon cells deposited on stainless-steel ribbon, cadmium telluride (CdTe) cells deposited on glass, and copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) alloy cells deposited on either glass or stainless steel substrates.

Recent research has established battery-free, grid-tied EPBT system values for several (year 2004-early 2005) photovoltaic module technologies (see Table 1). In Table 1, the values in the last column are the reciprocals of the respective values in the third column. It is seen that, even for the most energy intensive of these four common photovoltaic technologies, the energy required for producing the system does not exceed 10% of the total energy generated by the system during its anticipated operational lifetime. Future research will extend the table to include amorphous silicon and CIGS alloys.

Table 1. System Energy Payback Times for Several Different Photovoltaic Module Technologies.

(1700 kWh/m²/yr insolation and 75% performance ratio for the system compared to the module.)

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