PV-ICE 0.1.1a4

Tool to evaluate Circular Economy

Version
License
Documentation
Publications	Connected to Zenodo, awaiting first release

PV_ICE: PV in the Circular Economy, Dynamic Energy and Materials TOOL

This open-source tool implements Circular Economy metrics for photovoltaic (PV) materials. It can be used to quantify and assign a value framework to efforts on re-design, reduction, replacement, reuse, recycling, and lifetime and reliability increases in the PV value chain.

The PV_ICE is leveraging published data from different sources on PV manufacturing and predicted technological changes. Input data is being compiled here

This tool will help implement circularity metrics, quantify and assign a value framework to efforts on re-design, reduction, replacement, reusage, recycling, and lifetime and reliability increases on PV.

Documentation

The calculator follows the following diagram for calculating Mass Flow. Baseline inputs are available in the PV_ICE \ baselines folder for US and World past and projected values. Full documentation can be found at readthedocs.

Input data references include:

Real world installation data from IEA-PVPS reports for 1995 - 2010 (K. Bolcar and K. Ardani, “National Survey Report of PV Power Applications in the United States 2010,” IEA-PVPS, National Survey T1-19:2010, 2010. [Online]. Available: https://iea-pvps.org/national-survey-reports/.)

Projection installation data 2010-2019 from Q4 2019 Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables/SEIA U.S. Solar Market Insight (A. Perea et al., “U.S. Solar Market Insight: Q4 2019,” SEIA, Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, Dec. 2019.)

Installations projected to increase 8.9% compound annual growth rate through 2050 (IRENA, “Future of Solar PV 2019,” IRENA, 2019. Accessed: Apr. 02, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2019/Nov/IRENA_Future_of_Solar_PV_2019.pdf.)

Degradation rate (in percentage power loss per year) (D. C. Jordan, S. R. Kurtz, K. VanSant, and J. Newmiller, “Compendium of photovoltaic degradation rates,” Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications, vol. 24, no. 7, pp. 978–989, 2016, doi: 10.1002/pip.2744.)

Glass thickness data (ITRPV, “International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaic (ITRPV) 2019,” ITRPV, 10th, Oct. 2019.)

Reliability data, i.e. T50 and T90 lifetime in years (D. C. Jordan, B. Marion, C. Deline, T. Barnes, and M. Bolinger, “PV field reliability status—Analysis of 100 000 solar systems,” Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications, vol. n/a, no. n/a, Feb. 2020, doi: 10.1002/pip.3262.)

All manufacturing, recyling, collection efficiencies currently estimates with real world data pending.

Installation

CircularEconomy-MassFlowCalculator releases may be installed using the pip and conda tools. Please see the Installation page of the documentation for complete instructions.

CircularEconomy-MassFlowCalculator is compatible with Python 3.5 and above.

Install with:

pip install PV_ICE

For developer installation, download the repository, navigate to the folder location and install as:

pip install -e .

Contributing

We need your help to make PV_ICE a great tool! Please see the Contributing page for more on how you can contribute. The long-term success of CircularEconomy-MassFlowCalculator requires substantial community support.

License

BSD 3-clause

Getting support

If you suspect that you may have discovered a bug or if you'd like to change something about CF-MFA, then please make an issue on our GitHub issues page.

Citing

If you use PV_ICE in a published work, please cite:

Ayala Pelaez, Silvana; Mirletz, Heather; Silverman, Timothy; 
Carpenter, Alberta; Barnes, Teresa. “De-fluffing Circular 
Economy Metrics with Open-Source Calculator for PV” 
2020 PV Reliability Workshop, Denver CO.

and also please also cite the DOI corresponding to the specific version of PV_ICE that you used. PV_ICE DOIs are listed at Zenodo.org. For example for version 0.1.0:

Silvana Ayala Pelaez, Heather Mirletz, & Tim Silverman. 
(2020, December 16). NREL/PV_ICE: First Release v0.1.0 
(Version v0.1.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4324011