Resource considerations for durable large scale renewable energy harvesting applications

Mineral resource supplies have seen fluctuations in recent years because of growing interests from the renewable energy industry. In particular large scale demand from the photovoltaic industry and emerging energy harvesting technologies weigh heavily on global reserves of rare resources. The impact of scarce key resources on the industry is significant and expected to get more severe as the development of said technologies picks up momentum. This work presents a novel, comprehensive analysis of resource requirements for photovoltaic, thermoelectric and piezoelectric energy harvesting with a survey of state of the art developments in each field of research. Potential resource supply problems are identified, and solutions for these problems are presented to make large scale implementations of sustainable renewable energy harvesting applications possible.