UC Berkeley

Carbon dioxide has increased drastically in the last decades due to energy production, exacerbating the global warming problem. To address this issue, researchers have focused on developing energy production technologies from renewable sources. From the renewable energy sources, solar has shown great promise chiefly due to its high availability. The conversion of solar energy into electricity (photovoltaics) requires specialized equipment such as solar cells, and a coordinated supply chain to be able to manufacture this technology in a sustainable way and at low cost. Therefore, this chapter proposes an approach based on mathematical programming for the optimal design of a solar photovoltaics manufacturing system considering diverse criteria linked to economic and environmental variables such as minimum sustainable price, transportation costs, and technical limits. In addition, the dependence of the minimum sustainable price over inflation, electricity price, and weighted average capital cost is analyzed, showing that a variation of minimum sustainable price could significantly change the manufacturing supply chain topology.