Carbon emissions and reduction performance of photovoltaic systems in China | REVE News of the wind sector in Spain and in the world

Life cycle carbon emissions of kg CO2/W in 2011 to 0.75 kg CO2/W in 2018. Carbon intensity of kg CO2/kWh to 50.91 kg CO2/kWh.. For every 1 % increase in PV power generation, the carbon emissions from China’s power generation sector could be reduced by about 2.05 %.

Solar energy is an inexhaustible clean energy, which can be converted into electricity through photovoltaic (PV) modules. However, the production of these modules is a process of pollution, which will generate a large amount of carbon emissions. Therefore, investigating the carbon emission performance of PV systems is of great significance in achieving carbon neutrality. Here, this study comprehensively analyze the carbon emissions and carbon emission reduction performance of PV systems in China using life cycle assessment approach. The results show that the life cycle carbon emissions of kg CO₂/W in 2011 to 0.75 kg CO₂/W in 2018; meanwhile, the carbon intensity decreased from 74.24 to 50.91 kg CO₂/kWh, and the energy payback time decreased from 2.4 to 2.2 years. Between 2008 and 2018, × 10⁸ kg CO₂. In addition, for every 1 % increase in PV power generation, the total carbon emissions from the power generation sector in China from 2022 to 2035 could be reduced by approximately 2.05 %.

This study analyzes the carbon emissions and carbon reduction of PV systems in China on a larger spatial-temporal scale as well as in a future perspective. The results of this study provide a better understanding of the carbon emissions and reduction performance of PV systems, and provide some effective information for the high-quality development of the PV industry in China.

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Review of carbon emission assessment methods for PV systems

According to the Global Carbon Atlas [1], global carbon emissions reached approximately 35.44 billion tons in 2019 and are continuously rising. Therefore, to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality, photovoltaic (PV) power generation, as a widely recognized clean power generation method, has rapidly developed. This is a technology that uses the PV effect to convert solar energy directly into electricity. The photoelectric conversion process is zero-carbon [2], and PV power generation can reduce

Methods and materials

The framework mainly consists of three parts. First, based on the LCA method, the life cycle carbon emissions of PV systems in China are assessed. Then, the assessment results are used to analyze the cleaning performance, carbon emission performance, and carbon emission reduction performance of the PV systems. Finally, based on the cleaning performance of PV systems in China, the carbon emission reduction potential of PV systems from 2022 to 2035 is estimated.

Life cycle carbon emissions of PV systems in China

The calculation results of the carbon emissions during PV cell production are shown in Fig. 2 (see Fig. 1). The results indicate that from 2011 to 2018, the carbon emissions per unit area of PV cell production decreased substantially. The carbon emissions of multi-Si PV cells decreased from 151.11 to 59.39 kg CO₂/m², a decrease of more than 60 %, while the carbon emissions of mono-Si PV cells decreased from 297.62 to 67.73 kg CO₂/m², a decrease of more than 77 %. In addition, there were clear

Uncertainties in carbon emissions and energy consumption

In this study, the Sobol global sensitivity analysis method was used to measure the uncertainties in carbon emissions and energy consumption during PV cell production. This method is an effective technique to quantitatively identify the sensitivity of different parameters [[64], [65], [66]]; this approach identifies the sensitivity by generating a large number of random samples within the corresponding value ranges of various parameters and employing variance decomposition. Simultaneously, this

Conclusion

The main purpose of this study was to analyze the carbon emission performance and carbon emission reduction potential of PV systems in China. This study found.

(1)The life cycle carbon emissions of PV systems in China decreased from 1.657 kg CO₂/W in 2011 to 0.754 kg CO₂/W in 2018, and carbon emissions will continue to decrease in the future.
(2)The spatial distribution characteristics of the cleaning performance of PV systems in China mainly exhibited a downward trend from northwest to southeast

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Lunche Wang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition, revision. Tianzhi Qiu: Data curation, Writing – original draft, revi. Ming Zhang: Methodology, Software, Supervision, revision. Qian Cao: Methodology Martin Wild: Supervision, revision.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

This work was financially supported by the Open Research Program of the International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals (Grant No. CBAS2023ORP03), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42371354, 41975044, 41925007 and 41801021).