Environmental Effects of Technological Improvements in Polysilicon Photovoltaic Systems in China—A Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

Due to increasing pollution and the overexploitation of traditional energy, there is both an environmental and a resource threat to sustainable development. China’s government prioritizes the optimization of resource structures with photovoltaic industrial support policies to address the potential hazards of traditionally highly polluting energy resources. However, applying green energy resources is not a panacea for solving existing industrial pollution as environmental problems cannot be solved with the level of optimized energy types. Instead, it is necessary to further explore the potential carbon emissions from clean energy resources. Therefore, we construct a polysilicon PV system’s whole life cycle carbon emission model by applying the LCA method and further building the emission coefficient model. More specifically, we divided the system’s carbon emissions into six components and calculated each part separately. In addition, we further applied the case analysis method. We analyzed the carbon emissions of the 280 MW solar cell production project of a leading global PV module company in China. The research results indicated that polysilicon companies should proactively develop advanced production technologies to upgrade energy-saving and environmental safety measures to reduce resource and energy consumption from raw materials in the final disposal process.