BPCPPDYSOE21 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 5: Financial and Economic Systems and Evolutionary Game Theory

SOE 5.2: Vortrag

Dienstag, 23. März 2021, 14:20–14:40, SOEa

Explosive amortization times in the dynamics of photovoltaic implementation? — •Raoul Schmidt, Malte Schröder, and Marc Timme — Chair for Network Dynamics, Institute for Theoretical Physics and Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), TU Dresden

To combat climate change, renewable energy supply such as through photovoltaics (PV) becomes increasingly important. The amortization time of a single PV unit relates the energy (and CO2) expended for production, transport and installation of a unit to its electric power generation (and thus potential savings in CO2 emissions). Here, we analyze the CO2 budgeting dynamics of many PV units continuously added by new installations [1,2]. Intriguingly, the resulting systemic amortization time necessarily is substantially larger than that of a single unit. We demonstrate analytically that already at constant installation rate, it already is twice the amortization time of a single unit, whereas at an exponentially increasing rate, it may be arbitrarily much larger, with resulting relevant time scales in between 10 and more than 30 years - potentially beyond the life time of a PV unit. Intriguingly, evaluating installation data of the past two decades indicates an exponential installation rate on the global scale that may cause such explosive increase of CO2 budget amortization times.

[1] N. von der Heydt, DPG Spring Meeting Berlin (2018). [2] R. Schmidt et al., in prep. (2021).