Dresden 2020 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 2: Energy Systems (joint SOE/DY/AKE)

SOE 2.7: Vortrag

Montag, 16. März 2020, 11:00–11:15, GÖR 226

Explosive amortization times of photovoltaic systems? — •Raoul Schmidt, Malte Schröder, and Marc Timme — Chair for Network Dynamics, Institute for Theoretical Physics and Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), TU Dresden

To combat climate change, renewable energy systems such as photovoltaics (PV) are becoming increasingly important. The amortization time of a PV unit relates the energy (and CO₂) expended for production, transport and installation of a unit to its electric power generation (and thus potential savings in CO₂ emissions). Here, we consider the CO₂ budgeting dynamics of many PV units continuously added by new installations [von der Heydt, DPG Spring Meeting Berlin (2018)] and find that the resulting systemic amortization time necessarily is (much) larger than that of a single unit. We demonstrate analytically, that at constant installation rate, it already is twice the amortization time of a single unit, whereas at an exponentially increasing rate, it may be arbitrarily much larger, with resulting relevant time scales in between 10 and more than 30 years - beyond the life time of a PV unit. Intriguingly, evaluating installation data of the past two decades indicates an exponential installation rate that may cause such explosive increase of CO₂ budget amortization times on the global scale.