What Are the Energy and Environmental Impacts of Adding Battery Storage to Photovoltaics? A Generalized Life Cycle Assessment

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Renewable electricity generation is intermittent and its large‐scale deployment requires some degree of energy storage. Although best assessed at grid level, the incremental energy and environmental impacts of adding the required energy storage capacity may also be calculated specifically for each individual technology. This article deals with the latter issue for the case of photovoltaics (PV) complemented by lithium‐ion battery (LIB) storage. A life cycle assessment (LCA) of a 100 MW ground‐mounted PV system with 60 MW of lithium‐manganese oxide (LMO) LIB, under a range of irradiation and storage scenarios, shows that energy payback time and life cycle global warming potential increase by 7–30% (depending on storage duration scenarios), with respect to those of PV without storage. Thus, the benefits of PV when displacing conventional thermal electricity (in terms of carbon emissions and energy renewability) are only marginally affected by the addition of energy storage.