I ran this by a PV expert and he said there would be a lot of R&D to make this happen, but he thought the overall concept of making short-lived low embodied energy PV made sense.
The delivered column counts the output as the electricity produced, which is the one most relevant for our purposes. The primary column shows the more common LCA primary energy convention (Frischknecht et al. (2020)), which measures the thermal energy required to produce that electricity.
If the manufacture of the PV required mostly electricity, the delivered and primary would be more like a factor of 3 different. So they are finding that most of the energy required is high temperature heat, which electricity doesn’t have very much advantage in?
The table below shows the mass of each potentially-constraining element required to build the system at four deployment scales, against world reserves and resources.
Some of the units in the table didn’t render correctly.
Pumped hydro and compressed-air storage at suitable geology can come in below 1 MJ per MJ, but viable reservoirs and salt caverns are scale-limited well short of what a self-replicating economy needs.
Compressed air storage can use regular saline aquifers, like we do for storing natural gas, so I don’t think they will be scale limited.
I ran this by a PV expert and he said there would be a lot of R&D to make this happen, but he thought the overall concept of making short-lived low embodied energy PV made sense.
If the manufacture of the PV required mostly electricity, the delivered and primary would be more like a factor of 3 different. So they are finding that most of the energy required is high temperature heat, which electricity doesn’t have very much advantage in?
Some of the units in the table didn’t render correctly.
Compressed air storage can use regular saline aquifers, like we do for storing natural gas, so I don’t think they will be scale limited.