Sustainable Photovoltaics: Optimising Material Consumption, Cost and Environmental Performance Through Smart Sustainability Approaches for Crystalline Silicon Solar Photovoltaics

As annual photovoltaics (PV) deployment accelerates toward the terawatt scale, the industry faces three linked challenges: material constraints, cost competitiveness, and environmental performance. Conventional frameworks tend to treat these as competing objectives, where gains in one area incur losses in another. Here, we apply a “smart sustainability” framework to demonstrate how targeted design and material strategies can advance multiple objectives simultaneously. We present updated material learning curves and analyse how material intensity, embodied emissions, and energy return on investment (EROI) co‐evolve with deployment scale. Silicon and silver demonstrate that sustained reductions in specific consumption can simultaneously lower cost, ease supply pressure, and – particularly in the case of silicon – cut emissions. Advanced metallisation innovations offer promising pathways to sustain this trend, while next‐generation cells can introduce new material dependencies. The different frame materials and mounting configurations are also critical factors in optimising PV sustainability. In recent technological advancements, the EROI of PV is expected to further improve to global‐average values of >25, far exceeding the minimum EROI threshold required to sustain modern societies. Together, these findings demonstrate that performance and sustainability are not inherently competing objectives – and that system‐level optimisation can unlock pathways where all three advance together.