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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 to help quantify and assign a value framework to efforts on re-design, reduction, replacement, reusage, recycling, and lifetime and reliability increases on PV, implementing Circular Economy metrics for PV materials.

The PV_ICE leverages published data from different sources on PV manufacturing and predicted technological changes.

This tool will help implement circularity metrics, quantify and assign a value framework to efforts on re-design, reduction, replacement, reusage, recycling, and lifetime and reliability increases on PV.

The intended audience ranges from PV performance and analyst researchers, Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) companies, installers, investors, consumers and analysts of the PV industry interested in predicting and evaluating the impact of PV growth in our environment and how the improvements towards Circularity affect waste.

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:

Ayala Pelaez, Silvana; Mirletz, Heather; Silverman, Timothy; Carpenter, Alberta; Barnes, Teresa. “De-fluffing Circular Economy Metrics with Open-Source Calculator for PV” 2020 PV Reliability Workshop, Denver CO.

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

Indices and tables