Closing the Loop towards a sustainable future in energy supply

Today's main challenges for the solar industry are the need to reduce costs for solar systems, the foreseeable scarceness of raw materials and the necessary improvement of the energy pay back time. The unsolved recycling issues will become a problem in the near future.

The project SENSE will face these challenges by developing recycling strategies for a-Si, CIS and CdTe solar cells and by scientifically based analysis of the efficiency of the solar systems, based on Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). This has to consider production, product use and End of Life (EoL) aspects of the complete systems to be holistic. As recycling is a possibility to save energy for the primary production of new materials, it also will affect the energy payback time positively, beneath the reduction of the material scarceness and the reduction of material costs.