Eroi Solar Panels

There are a wide variety of estimates of solar pv s eroi as well in part because the technologies and production techniques are improving fast a major reason for the large price reductions over the past decade.

Eroi solar panels.

Solar energy has low even counterproductive energy return on energy investment eroei short answer. In fact published eroeis for solar pv and wind might be called misleading. 10 to 15 years ahead of what i forecast in 2011. That should be obvious increasing efficiency and lower energy costs per watt make it so.

However when the number is small. If we used only the estimates from 2010 on we d find an eroi for poly si solar of around 15. When the eroi is large that means that producing energy from that source is relatively easy and cost effective. A recent paper by ferroni and hopkirk 2016 asserts that the eroei also referred to as eroi of photovoltaic pv systems is so low that they actually act as net energy sinks rather than delivering energy to society.

7 to 10 years ahead of what i forecast in 2015. The goal of this study was to do a systematic review and a meta analysis of the embedded energy energy payback time epbt and energy return on energy invested eroi metrics for the crystalline si and thin film pv technologies published in 2000 2013. Studies have given figures for the eroi of solar energy as low as 3 9 and as high as 45 45. Solar power or nuclear power for example.

Actually solar energy has superb energy return on energy investment eroei 1 to 4. That is to say the eroi of solar panels being made in 2013 is quite a bit higher than of solar panels made in 2000. In 2016 hall observed that much of the published work in this field is produced by advocates or persons with a connection to business interests among the competing technologies and that government agencies had not yet provided adequate funding for rigorous analysis by more neutral observers. Such claim if accurate would call into question many energy investment decisions.

The result is a serious bias that tends to make the eroeis of solar pv as well as other intermittent energy sources such as wind appear far more favorable than they would be if a level playing field were used. In fact solar has reached prices today that are. In the case of photovoltaic solar panels the iea method tends to focus on the energy used in the factory process alone. There is a fast growing interest in better understanding the energy performance of pv technologies as evidenced by a large number of recent studies published on this topic.

Inman used the most recent peer reviewed study he could find raugei et al 2012 cited above.