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Welcome to PV in Circular Economy tool documentation!

The Photovoltaics in Circular Economy tool (PV ICE) is a NREL supported tool which quantifies the dynamic mass, energy, environmental and social impacts of implementing Circular Economy Pathways for PV.

The PV ICE leverages published data from different sources on PV manufacturing and predicted technological changes. The tool is flexible and dynamic, allowing users complete control over inputs to explore: - a variety of technologies, from commericalized silicon to novel emerging PV, - multiple scenarios, such as varying lifetime, changing policy, or technology shifts, - across a range of scales, from single installation to global deployment.

This tool quantifies and assigns a value frameworks to Circular Economy Pathways for PV, including lifetime and reliability increases, re-design, reduction, replacement, reuse, and recycling of PV.

The intended audience ranges from PV performance and analyst engineers and researchers, Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) companies, installers, investors, consumers and analysts of the PV industry interested in predicting and evaluating the impact of Circular PV growth for Energy Transition on supply chains, energy demands, the environment and people.

The source code for PV_ICE is hosted on github.

Please see the Installation page for installation help.

Citing PV_ICE

If you use this calculator in a published work, please cite:

S. Ovaitt & H. Mirletz, S. Seetharaman, and T. Barnes, “PV in the Circular Economy, A Dynamic Framework Analyzing Technology Evolution and Reliability Impacts,” ISCIENCE, Jan. 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.103488.

Please also cite the DOI corresponding to the specific version of PV_ICE that you used. pvlib-python DOIs are listed at Zenodo.org

Contents

Indices and tables