Environmental effects of China's solar photovoltaic industry during 2011–2016: A life cycle assessment approach

Thanks to many government incentives, China has provided, at relatively low prices, a number of solar PV products to the world and enhanced domestic solar PV power. While China's growing solar PV industry has brought about both domestic and international environmental benefits, the provision of heavy subsidies has motivated the discussion of social and economic benefits and costs of this technology. Using the LCA approach, this paper performs an in-depth analysis on the environmental benefits and costs of this industry for the period of 2011–2016. Differing from existing literature, this paper broadens system boundaries to cover 11 stages of the solar PV industry life cycle, taking module sources and market directions of PV system into consideration, and quantifies the costs of environmental emissions of the industry by shadow pricing. The key finding of this study is that during 2011–2016 the total environment benefit was smaller than the total cost of China's solar PV industry. Meanwhile, coinciding with the rise of the domestic solar PV market, the resulting net environmental benefits have witnessed dramatic yearly growth. Policy implications and conclusions from findings are provided at the end of this paper.