EU scientists and engineers who modelled a 1kWp PV system using polymeric photovoltaic technology in a typical southern European climate to examine the levelised electricity cost (LEC) have said that competitive solar electricity is within reach.
Lead author Brian Azzopardi, and co-authors from The University of Manchester, Imperial College London, Technical University of Cartagena, and Technical University of Denmark, calculated the electricity price to the customer, taking into account the materials, direct process energy, labour, system components, design and maintenance costs, manufacturing investment and overhead costs.
A LEC of between 0.19€/kWh and €0.50€/kWh could be realised with a system installed today under an average solar irradiance of 1700kWh/m2/year. Dr Azzopardi said their world-first comprehensive economic modelling electricity costs for polymer photovoltaic technology based on a pre-industrial process showed that with technical developments in efficiency, the LEC power is competitive with mature PV technology and Solar thermal technologies.
“Polymeric PV offers flexibility, adaptability and the possibility of implementation in a variety of contexts such as the integration into building components and textiles, dual function appliances, replaceable modules as well as lower weight that may reduce the system component cost. However, the system component costs still needed to be analysed and were assumed on a typical silicon PV system,” he said. Where previous studies had not much evidence to corroborate polymeric PV as the answer to the low cost and sustainable solar electricity, Dr Azzopardi said his research was an “inclusive evaluation” of the entire system installed today ready to generate electricity using current market prices and a pre-industrial scale manufacturing process.
Competitiveness with silicon PV is reached for module lifetimes of less than five years when cell efficiencies reach seven per cent or more.
A certain lifetime and efficiency must be reached for polymeric PV technology to be economically viable and sustainable, but Dr Azzopardi said the Mediterranean conditions are right to start production and exploit the potential.
The study also shows that the module costs still constitute the largest part of the total OPV system costs. This fraction could be reduced through efficiency improvement and thus tackle this bottleneck for low-cost PV modules.
Dr Azzopardi’s collaborative paper was published in the Energy and Environmental Science Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.