Over the last years, many authors have presented analysis on the life cycle assessment of perovskite solar cells with consideration of a particular structure/design where a fixed set of materials and processes are selected to fabricate the solar cell.
Moreover, the range for impacts also presents an opportunity to optimize perovskite solar modules keeping LCA indicators as one of the objective functions in order to exploit their potential of having significantly lower environmental impacts.
S. Albrecht, B. Rech, Perovskite solar cells: On top of commercial photovoltaics. , 16196 (2017).
Previous life cycle assessment (LCA) studies on perovskite tandems investigated specific tandem stacks, but only considered limited impact categories (8, 21 – 23) because of the incomplete high-quality life cycle inventory (LCI) datasets in existing databases, and do not consider scalability and industry-compatibility issues.
Although perovskite LCAs have large uncertainties due to the absence of commercial data 55, important information can be gleaned from a study of commercial CdTe thin-film modules. Gong et al. modelled the embodied energy of perovskite modules and found that it ranged from 390 MJ m −2 to 450 MJ m −2, not accounting for an Al frame 11.
In another case study, Serrano-Lujan et al. showed that lead-based perovskite solar cells have lower environmental impacts than tin-based perovskite and included the end-of-life scenarios such as landfill and incineration in system boundaries.