• Energy Research

In the last decade, the manufacturing capacity of silicon, the dominant PV technology, has increasingly been concentrated in China. This has led to PV cost reduction of approximately 80%, while, at the same time, posing risks to PV supply chain security. Recent advancements of novel perovskite tandem PV technologies as an alternative to traditional silicon-based PV provide opportunities for diversification of the PV manufacturing capacity and for increasing the GHG emission benefit of solar PV. Against this background, we estimate the current and future cost-competitiveness and GHG emissions of a set of already commercialized as well as emerging PV technologies for different production locations (China, USA, EU), both at residential and utility-scale. We find EU and USA-manufactured thin-film tandems to have 2 to 4% and 0.5 to 2% higher costs per kWh and 37 to 40%and 32 to 35% less GHG emissions per kWh at residential and utility-scale, respectively. Our projections indicate that they will also retain competitive costs (up to 2% higher)and a 20% GHG emissions advantage per kWh in 2050.

Abstract Many countries committed to climate action by adopting the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. This study synthesizes 40 years of scientific evidence of what may be an important benefit of these commitments: the non-use value of biodiversity conservation. The synthesis investigates whether biodiversity values can be integrated into climate change damage estimates based on non-use valuation studies of different threats to biodiversity. In the absence of estimates of public willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid the adverse impacts of anthropogenic climate change on biodiversity, we synthesize non-use values for biodiversity conservation from stated preference studies that account for a heterogeneous set of biodiversity threats. We test whether biodiversity non-use values are affected by the threats that policies aim to address, be it human activities or other threats. We estimate meta-regression models in which we explain the variation in these non-use values by accounting for the observed heterogeneity in good, methodology, sample, and context characteristics. We estimate meta-regression models using 159 observations from 62 publications. The models suggest that non-use values for biodiversity conservation addressing human impacts may be larger than those addressing other threats. We also find that non-use values are generally not sensitive to which biodiversity indicators, habitat types, or taxonomic groups are valued. We predict that the mean annual WTP for avoiding human-caused biodiversity losses ranges from 0.2 to 0.4% of GDP per capita. Our findings suggest that state-of-the-art climate change damage functions in integrated assessment models may underestimate actual damage costs because they do not incorporate the premium that the public is willing to pay to avoid human-caused biodiversity losses.

AbstractMany economic and environmental studies on novel perovskite solar cells (PSCs), published ex post the development stage to investigate the market competitiveness, have focused on laboratory‐scale PSC architectures that are not amenable for upscaling. In this paper, we evaluate the market potential and environmental sustainability of a scalable carbon‐electrode‐based PSC by benchmarking it to the market dominating c‐Si photovoltaics and CIGS thin film photovoltaics. The analysis covers the PSCs full lifecycle, at the module and system levels (residential and utility scale), and is based on realistic annual energy output data derived from energy yield calculations. We find that this PSC can produce electricity at low cost (3–6 €cents/kWh), with lowest energy payback (0.6–0.8 years) and greenhouse gas emissions (15–25g CO2 eq./kWh) compared with grid‐connected PV market alternatives, assuming 25years of lifetime, expected PV system cost reductions, and PSC module recycling and refurbishment.