Material Bottlenecks for Scaling Photovoltaics – EU PVSEC 2025

Our colleague Olga Kanz from the Sustainable Life Cycles team presented a poster at EU PVSEC 2025 in Bilbao – the world’s leading scientific conference on photovoltaics.

Her contribution, entitled “Europe in 2050 – Material Challenges of Scaling up Photovoltaics”, addressed future material constraints in the European PV sector. Based on a life cycle assessment (LCA) and the abiotic resource depletion potential method, the study identifies tellurium and silver as critical materials. For both, projected EU demand in 2050 exceeds the current levels of domestic production.

These findings underline the importance of integrating resource considerations into long-term strategies for a sustainable and resilient PV expansion in Europe.

We thank the organisers of EU PVSEC for an excellent and well-coordinated conference with a strong international and interdisciplinary exchange.