Avaliação do Ciclo de Vida de painel fotovoltaico: análise dos impactos ambientais e fim de vida em estudo de caso no sul do Brasil

Abstract

In Brazil, the high sunshine, the fast sector development and the product cost reduction, facilitated the populations access to the solar energy systems installation in their properties. However, despite the environmental benefits in these systems use phase, it is observed that there are few studies about the impacts generated in other stages, such as production and end-of-life. Recent studies demonstrate that in the coming decades, a large amount of photovoltaic panels will be obsolete. Thus, from an interdisciplinary approach, involving knowledge related to energy efficiency in architecture and product design, this research seeks to analyze the environmental impacts caused in a photovoltaic panel system life cycle installed in brazilian buildings. Defined by ISO 14040, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used as a method to quantify the inputs and outputs flows of material, energy and waste in industrial product systems, allowing the environmental impact calculation in several categories, and in this case, through the OpenLCA software. Therefore, the LCA results of a photovoltaic panel system are analyzed in different impact categories, especially these systems obsolescence in near future scenarios. The results demonstrate that the photovoltaic panel production, and specially the photovoltaic cell production, are the life cycle phase that causes the most relevant environmental impacts, regardless the end-of-life strategy. About the end-of-life, when comparing landfill and incineration situations, the results showed that the isolated landfill process represents most relevant impacts, however, transport and distances need to be taken into account for the system general scenario analysis. In this way, this research confirms the pertinence of the LCA elaboration of case studies for valid results of environmental impact from the holistic lyfe cycle analysis.