A climate rationale for research and development on photovoltaics manufacture

This study presents a novel framework using the cumulative radiative forcing (CRF) metric to demonstrate the significant climate benefit of improving PV manufacturing processes predominantly located in GHG-intensive geographies and determines the equivalent increase in module efficiency that provide the same climate benefit. The findings show low-carbon PV manufacturing increases the life-cycle climate benefit by 20% and is equivalent to increasing the module efficiency from a baseline value of 17% to 21.7% and 16% to 18.7% for mono-Si and multi-Si modules, respectively. With commercial module efficiency having increased annually by only 0.25% over the last 12 years, the implication is that improving PV manufacturing may be more effective than module efficiency improvements for increasing the climate benefit of terawatt scale PV installations.