The transportation industry has led efforts to fight climate change and reduce air pollution. Autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs) that use artificial intelligence, next-generation batteries, etc., ...are predicted to replace conventional internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) in the coming years. In this study, we performed a life cycle assessment to analyze A-EVs and compare their impacts with those from EV and ICEV systems. The scope of the analysis consists of the manufacturing and use phases, and a functional unit of 150,000 miles·passenger was chosen for the assessment. Our results on the impacts from the manufacturing phase of the analyzed systems show that the A-EV systems have higher impacts than other transportation systems in the majority of the impacts categories analyzed (e.g., global warming potential, ozone depletion, human toxicity-cancer) and, on average, EV systems were found to be the slightly more environmentally friendly than ICEV systems. The high impacts in A-EV are due to additional components such as cameras, sonar, and radar. In comparing the impacts from the use phase, we also analyzed the impact of automation and found that the use phase impacts of A-EVs outperform EV and ICEV in many aspects, including global warming potential, acidification, and smog formation. To interpret the results better, we also investigated the impacts of electricity grids on the use phase impact of alternative transportation options for three representative countries with different combinations of renewable and conventional primary energy resources such as hydroelectric, nuclear, and coal. The results revealed that A-EVs used in regions that have hydropower-based electric mix become the most environmentally friendly transportation option than others.
End-of-life management of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin-film solar photovoltaics (PV) panels is crucial due to the necessity of recycling valuable elements such as indium ($400/kg) and ...gallium ($618/kg), ensuring both economic viability and environmental sustainability. In this study, we analyze the private and external costs of end-of-life management for CIGS PV designed for mass-scale recycling. Our findings reveal that the private and external costs of end-of-life management range from ∼$3.5 to $4.5 and ∼$3.0 to $4.0 per m2, respectively. The chemicals utilized in the recycling process, particularly NaOH and HCl, significantly contribute to climate change, photochemical oxidant formation, particulate matter formation, and freshwater eutrophication impact categories, accounting for ∼50 % to 90 % of the impacts. Furthermore, we found the net cost of recycling by subtracting the economic benefit obtained from recovered materials from the sum of private and external costs, revealing values ranging between $4.3 and $5.7 per m2 of CIGS PV module. These findings suggest that there is room to reduce the net cost further by recovering more materials from the CIGS PV modules components.End-of-life management of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin-film solar photovoltaics (PV) panels is crucial due to the necessity of recycling valuable elements such as indium ($400/kg) and gallium ($618/kg), ensuring both economic viability and environmental sustainability. In this study, we analyze the private and external costs of end-of-life management for CIGS PV designed for mass-scale recycling. Our findings reveal that the private and external costs of end-of-life management range from ∼$3.5 to $4.5 and ∼$3.0 to $4.0 per m2, respectively. The chemicals utilized in the recycling process, particularly NaOH and HCl, significantly contribute to climate change, photochemical oxidant formation, particulate matter formation, and freshwater eutrophication impact categories, accounting for ∼50 % to 90 % of the impacts. Furthermore, we found the net cost of recycling by subtracting the economic benefit obtained from recovered materials from the sum of private and external costs, revealing values ranging between $4.3 and $5.7 per m2 of CIGS PV module. These findings suggest that there is room to reduce the net cost further by recovering more materials from the CIGS PV modules components.
Land use competition between agricultural activities and ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment has increased worldwide attention to hybrid agriculture, and PV systems known as agrivoltaic ...systems (AVS) in efforts to increase the efficiency of energy and food production and minimize the land use competition. However, little is known about AVS's economic feasibility and environmental tradeoffs. Here we aim to evaluate the techno-economic and environmental impacts of four AVS configurations (full density, half density, mono-axial tracking, and bi-axial tracking) and compare their performance against PV-only systems. We used the life cycle revenue generated from a hectare of land area ($/ha) as a functional unit of our analysis. We found that all AVS configurations outperformed PV-only systems in the economic feasibility assessment, where bi-axial tracking was the best-performing AVS. Further, we developed a case scenario for agricultural farmers to determine the minimum selling price of electricity required for AVS to compete with the economic performance of crop-only farms. We found that the AVS designs require additional incentives (2¢ - 6¢ per kWh of electricity generation) to be as competitive as the crop-only farms. The life cycle environmental assessment demonstrated that the AVS has better environmental performance than PV-only systems, with ∼15–55 % less environmental impacts per functional unit. On average, electricity generation accounts for ∼80 % of AVS environmental impacts, while food production and water demand account for ∼20 %. Additionally, a sensitivity analysis conducted on various uncertain parameters, such as crop yield, water demand, electricity selling price, crop selling prices, discount, and inflation rates, while varying these parameters across broader ranges, indicates that AVS designs become a more economically and environmentally sustainable alternative over PV-only systems in the majority (>66 %) of the data analyzed.
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•Both life cycle economic and environmental impacts of agrivoltaics were analyzed.•Agrivoltaics have better economic performance compared to photovoltaic-only systems.•Agrivoltaics need 2–6¢ incentives to outperform crop-only farms.•Agrivoltaics have 15–55 % less environmental impact than photovoltaic-only systems.
While perovskite solar cells (PSC) have a high potential of achieving commercial-scale manufacturing, they still face some deficiencies regarding rapid degradation in the presence of moisture, ...oxygen, and high-temperature exposure. To address these challenges, recent research has identified lower dimensional (LD) materials as promising candidates to improve the stability and power conversion efficiency (PCE) of PCSs. The goal of this study is to analyze the environmental performance of LD material-based PSCs (ld-PSC) through a comprehensive life cycle assessment, comparing their environmental performance with reference PSC and commercial photovoltaics (PV) technologies including single-crystalline (c-Si), copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) and cadmium telluride (CdTe). To achieve this objective, we evaluated five LD materials such as graphene, reduced graphene oxide (rGO), graphene quantum dots (GQDs), molybdenum disulfide (MoS
2
), and black phosphorus (BP) that are commonly studied in experimental works, and two alternative (Alt) ld-PSC configurations such as Alt-1 and Alt-2, featuring LD materials with lower environmental and comparatively higher among those studied. A comparison of LD materials on a unit mass basis reveals that rGO, graphene, and MoS
2
are the most environmentally friendly options. However, their environmental impact changes significantly when incorporated into ld-PSC configurations based on the type and amount of chemicals used for the dispersion which emphasizes the importance of carefully selecting the chemicals used for dispersion. Our results show that the Alt-1 configuration is ∼25% lower and the Alt-2 configuration has ∼15% higher average environmental impacts compared to reference PSCs. Further analyses show that at 20% benchmark PCE, ld-PSC has the potential to outperform the environmental performance of all conventional technologies, even with a lifetime up to 2.5 times shorter. Additionally, ld-PSC has a faster energy payback period compared to commercial PV technologies.
Perovskite solar cells integrated with lower dimensional materials can outperform the environmental performance of conventional solar photovoltaic technologies such as crystalline silicon, CIGS, and CdTe with shorter lifetimes.
