Silicon

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Purity Levels

• Microchip silicon is nine nines pure, whereas power transistor silicon is 6 nines. [1]

PV Panel Embodied Energy

• See this reference for more detail [2]
• And this discusses poly si vs mono si [3]
• embodied energy of 165-375 kWhr/kg [4]
  • Good news - 65% of all energy goes into the wafers, as opposed to everything else (glass + All + EVA) according to same link
  • Similar for amorphous silicon [5]
• Compare to steel at 20 MJ/kg [6], and 200MJ/kg more than this for aluminum [7]
• How many grams of silicon are needed for 1kW of PV panels? 2 kg [8], based on 2g/W.
• 5% of weight of PV is silicon [9]. 76% is glass, 10% is aluminum, and 10% is EVA.
• Embodied energy of EVA is about 80 mega joules per kilogram [10]

Total for 1kW of PV

• 600 kWhr for 2 kg of silicon
• 3kWhr per kg for glass, or 90 kWhr for 30 kg glass. [11]
• About 40 kWhr per my of EVA/aluminum x 8 kg = 320 kwhr
• Total 1010 kWhr
  • if the low estimate of 165 kilowatt hours above is true and this is 65% of the energy required then we have around 300 kilowatt hours of energy for wafers, and total around 500 kWhr for 1 kW of new PV panels - meaning energy payback of around 1/4 year!
• The case here would be easy for open sector PV production
• 365*6kWhr~2100 kWhr/yr
• Payback is thus 1/2 yr with only the above.
• This matches results from Fraunhofer 2021, close enough - .7-1.4 year payback time. [12]

Links

• DIY Glacial Acetic Acid
• Wikipedia says 585 kWhr/m2 of PV panels? [13]