Life-cycle assessment of organic solar cell technologies

Organic photovoltaics are often proposed as a solution to achieve low cost and low environmental impact in a solar cell. In this work, life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted for various donor and acceptor materials, taking into account required purity of reactants and solvents, low yields for reactions, repeated purification steps, and toxic chemicals and solvents used for production of electronic grade semi-conductor materials. The full life cycle of complete single junction organic solar cells was done, based on current state-of-the art efficiencies reported for various donor/acceptor combinations. At this point, it is shown that the increase in device efficiency results in an increase in energy payback, mainly because higher concentrations of [C70]PCBM are being used which have a higher embodied energy compared to lower efficiency [C60]PCBM - based solar cells.