As announced in PV Power #22, a workshop on PV Environmental Health and Safety issues was held in conjunction with the European PV Solar Energy Conference in Barcelona on 8th June.

With PV industry and markets both growing globally at a rapid pace, the subject of environmental aspects of the technology is attracting renewed interest. As is often argued, all energy technologies should be subject to such rigorous assessment. However as outlined elsewhere in this newsletter, public funding of PV research, development and demonstration is increasing – and indeed, needs to remain at healthy levels for some years to come. Consequently, public (and political) perceptions about PV need to be firmly grounded.

The workshop also performed the function of a ‘task definition meeting’ whereby the framework for a new PVPS research activity could be developed. In particular the focus for the event was the presentation of selected EH&S activities, identification of opportunities for EH&S activities and their scope within the IEA PVPS Programme, agreement on possible topics for cooperation and agreement on follow-up activities.

The workshop explored the status of life cycle analysis (LCA) as it applies to PV, particularly concerning energy payback improvements, and highlighted some of the new areas receiving attention, such as the recycling of PV system materials, voluntary take-back schemes for PV modules and module refurbishment.

From the LCA perspective, the workshop highlighted concerns over data integrity, or at least over the dissemination and use of the most up-to-date information for aspects such as embedded energy, materials content and emissions analysis. This accentuated the opportunity and need for global cooperation to exchange data to better support political, environmental, technological and market decision makers.

More generally, the outcomes included a common understanding of the topic on a global scale, an update on future research, technology and framework needs and an expressed interest from US Government and industry to support further work on the topic as a new IEA PVPS activity.

Presentations from the workshop can be found in the section IEA PVPS industry workshop: PV systems - meeting the sustainability challenge .

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