Life Cycle Assessment of Photovoltaic electricity production in Italy: Current scenario and future developments

This study presents a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of photovoltaic (PV) electricity production in Italy based on the composition of the current and future Italian PV scenario. Using detailed and site-specific data, the actual composition of the Italian mix of PV technologies at the end of 2022 and those expected for 2030 were defined. A new LCA modelling of the most relevant PV technologies was carried out using updated and reliable inventory data. The impact assessment was performed adopting the most relevant impact categories of Environmental Footprint Method v. 3.1. The environmental profiles of the two Italian PV scenarios (PV Scenario_2021 and PV Scenario_2030) analysed in this study were compared with that of the PV scenario achievable using unaltered Ecoinvent v 3.9.1 datasets specific to Italian. The obtained results highlighted that the use of Ecoinvent datasets and hypothesis entails a significant overestimation of the environmental impacts of photovoltaic electricity production in Italy; showing higher impacts ranging from 70 % to 30 % (depending on the impact category considered) and the main key factors affecting the results were investigated. However, the wide impacts gaps pointed out the importance of conducting representative LCA studies of the fast-growing and evolving PV context of the countries, to provide reliable impact results to policy makers and to other researchers and who need to include the PV electricity generation in their studies. Furthermore, the environmental performance analysis of the two Italian PV scenarios highlighted the higher sustainability of the PV electricity production in the next years (PV Scenario_2030) for all considered impact categories (except for land use). This improvement can be primarily attributed to the higher annual energy yield and the greater utilization of high-efficiency PV technologies, along with the expansion of ground-mounted PV plants.