IEA-PVPS releases revised 2026 Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) report with more representative data on PV production, energy, emissions, recycling and end-of-life processes. The report emphasizes considerable gains in silicon recycling, wafer efficiency and minimized environmental implications throughout PV supply chains.
The International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Program (PVPS) has released a complete update of its life cycle inventory (LCI) report. The latest publication of this LCI study was in 2020, and it provides a complete database of the materials, energy usage, emissions, and processes involved in the manufacture, operation, and recycling of PV systems during their whole life cycle.
Improvements in Silicon Recycling and Wafer Efficiency
“The most striking thing is how significantly the silicon supply chain has altered compared to the last study, and how directly this affects inventory,”
Matthias Stucki of IEA-PVPS’ Task 12 tells pv magazine. The aggregated industry statistics reveal a notable rise in the proportion of internally recycled silicon used in ingot manufacture compared to prior report editions.
“This is a precise, well-characterized loop,”
Stucki said.
“The scrap from the cropping and squaring of monocrystalline ingots is of solar-grade purity and can be fed back into crystal growth.”
“This closed-loop recycling is modeled in our inventories as a dedicated process with its own material and energy inputs,”
noted the contributing author of Report IEA-PVPS T12-33:2026.
“Kerf loss in the sawing process has also improved significantly on the sawing side. Ever thinner diamond wires have reduced kerf loss even more, so less silicon is lost per wafer to begin with,”
he said.
“Together with thinner wafers and improved process efficiencies, the environmental impact of the module supply chain has been significantly reduced, as has been the case with inverters.”
More Representative Industry Data
The thorough data sets included in the paper will be of use to scholars, policy makers, industry and life cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners. The monocrystalline silicon supply chain statistics for TOPCon cell technology cover around 29% of worldwide polysilicon, 16% of global wafer, 7% of global cell, and 9% of global module manufacturing capacity. CdTe data, however, comprise more than 90% of the CdTe module market.
“The biggest improvement in the 2026 report is the data basis for the monocrystalline silicon supply chain. It is based on 83 factory-level LCAs gathered in the context of the French PV tender process led by ADEME between 2022 and 2025,”
Stucki said.
“This greatly improves the representativeness of the inventories compared to previously available public PV LCI datasets, as they now show the technologies that are actually dominant on the market, including TOPCon on n-type wafers and current wafer and module designs.”
New Simulated Data for Advanced Manufacturing
Stucki also said the update brings additional country-specific PV mix information, as well as a new type of data – bottom-up simulated LCIs for advanced monocrystalline silicon fabrication, created at Fraunhofer ISE.
“The measured industry data tell you what the market looks like, but they’re aggregated and anonymized, and they always tell you about the recent past,”
he said.
“The simulated LCIs, however, model the full chain from polysilicon to module bottom-up, with explicit mass and energy balances for more detailed processes, including factory buildings, facility infrastructure, water management and waste treatment.”
