Abstract The integration of photovoltaic and battery energy storage (PV-BES) systems offers a promising pathway to reduce the environmental footprint of manufacturing facilities, but its effectiveness depends on balancing economic feasibility with environmental benefit. This study proposes a bi-objective optimization framework that links PV-BES system sizing, energy dispatch, and manufacturing production scheduling to explicitly characterize and balance the trade-off between economic cost and life cycle (LC) environmental impact under Time-of-Use (TOU) electricity pricing. By explicitly accounting for manufacturing throughput requirements and material flow constraints, and by evaluating environmental performance using LC assessment metrics based on ReCiPe endpoint indicators, the framework enables a manufacturing-aware characterization of economic-environmental trade-offs. A case study of a lithium-ion battery assembly facility shows that purely cost-driven operations prioritize short-term savings but exhibit limited alignment with renewable energy availability, constraining decarbonization potential, whereas an environmentally driven strategy substantially reduces LC impact at a significantly higher cost. Pareto frontier and knee-point analysis further demonstrate that effective manufacturing decarbonization requires explicit balancing of economic and environmental objectives, and that an intermediate operating strategy can capture much of the environmental benefit while remaining economically viable.
Wang et al. (2026) studied this question.