Sustainable Solar Electricity

This book provides a detailed life cycle assessment of photovoltaic technologies in order to analyse the environmental and socioeconomic impacts that a large deployment of solar photovoltaic systems will produce in the near future.

Including both commercial and emerging technologies, the book presents the energy and materials requirements to manufacture solar electricity power systems at the order of the TeraWatt scale deployment as is envisaged by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) for the near future. It discusses current manufacturing practices and how these may be adapted in the future including:

• reuse and recycling of components and materials;
• raw material supply chains to the manufacturing factories; and
• end-of-life procedures including recycling and landfilling of modules.

The environmental and socioeconomic impacts of solar energy are analysed in detail, providing recommendations for standardization and regulations in order to make photovoltaic technologies, both current and emerging, a really sustainable alternative for the supply of “greener” electricity.

• Solar Electricity
• Photovoltaic Technology
• Life Cycle Assessment
• Renewable Energy
• Environmental and Socioeconomic Impacts
• Sustainable Energy Systems
• Energy Materials Recycling and Reuse
• Emerging Solar Cells
• Photovoltaic Energy
• Socioeconomics of Solar Electricity

• Institute for Advanced Materials and Mathematics (INAMAT2) and Department of Sciences, Public University of Navarra (UPNA), Pamplona, Spain

  Antonio Urbina

Professor Antonio Urbina is working at the Institute for Advanced Materials and Mathematics (INAMAT2) and the Department of Sciences (Public University of Navarra, UPNA, Spain). He has been working on the development of solar photovoltaic systems for more than 20 years, many of them at Technical University of Cartagena (UPCT, Spain). Starting from his Ph.D. studies on electronic transport in III-V semiconductor devices, he has worked on the physics of solar cells for several photovoltaic technologies, running from commercial Silicon to GaAs to emerging organic and hybrid photovoltaic technologies in collaboration with international research centres such as Imperial College London, Technical University of Denmark and several Spanish universities and research centres. He has also worked on the deployment and evaluation of  photovoltaic systems both in large grid-connected plants and in small stand-alone systems for rural electrification in developing countries suchas México, Guatemala and Cuba (for which he received the Prize of the National Academy of Sciences in Cuba in 2018 in collaboration with Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas, Santa Clara, Cuba). For several years, he has focused on the development of life cycle assessment methodologies to be applied to commercial and emerging photovoltaic technologies in order to evaluate the environmental impacts and possible bottlenecks to its massive deployment. He has published more than 60 scientific articles in international journals, has participated in several conferences and is a member of international scientific advisory committees at large research facilities such as Institute Laue Langevin (ILL, France) or ISIS neutron spallation source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK).

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