ABSTRACT
Life cycle assessment or life cycle analysis (LCA) is an important tool for assessing technology based on its environmental impacts associated with all stages of production, distribution, use, and end-of-life. LCA is useful as it quantifies the key environmental impacts in each process and material into categories such as impacts on global warming potential (GWP), human health, respiratory system by inorganics, land-use, terrestrial ecotoxicity, non-renewable resource depletion, and energy payback time (EPBT) which is most relevant to energy generation technology. GWP is dependent on the module lifetime, while EPBT remains constant. Results from sensitivity analysis show that EPBT and CO2 is most sensitive to changes in performance ratio and primary energy consumption. Perovskite cell performance plays a key role in bringing the EPBT down to match those of incumbent photovoltaic technologies. Nevertheless, the calculated EPBT of 1–1.5 years is comparable to those of incumbent technologies.
