Some conditions for significant contribution from photovoltaics to sustainable development

摘要

In medium-long term perspective, the anthropogenic atmospheric pollution, due to fossil fuel burning, could be contained by massively using of renewable energy. Significant improvements are expected to arise from diffusion into use of large scale PV power systems. Considering the situation in Italy as a typical study case, a limit can be individuated, which makes that PV contribution to annual electric energy balance can reach a maximum of about 7%. Such a figure corresponds to about 2% in terms of contribution to total energy balance. Thus, the intermittent energy sources are destined, in Italy, to be confined to a role, just significant (7%) in the electric energy sector, but quite marginal (2%) with reference to expected environmental massive benefits. Apart from numerical results, this disappointing concept can be applied in general to all OCSE countries, which globally produce the largest amount of world pollutant energy. Consequently, if photovoltaics wants to acquire a real environmental consistence, the limit of PV system diffusion has to be overcome. This can be attained by implementing the present grid-tied reference model for PV system diffusion by including an hydrogen production and storage system.