Climate change is disrupting our environment and business-as-usual practices will fail to reverse its impact. This paper focuses on the impact of the building sector and, in particular, it questions the energy and environmental benefits of advanced integrated and more conventional building-applied photovoltaic (PV) systems, compared to a traditional municipality utility supply. A demonstration project named the ecological living module (ELM) is used to create a comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of the adoption of these PV systems across three different climatic locations, namely New York City, London, and Nairobi. Findings show that, over the entire life cycle, the solar systems do better than the grid mix in reducing the building's dependence on nonrenewable resources. Unsurprisingly, in comparative terms, these systems do substantially better if the local grid mix is characterized by a predominantly nonrenewable energy profile. When comparing the two solar systems, the environmental impacts of the solar cells are negligible in the advanced system, whereas its structural components result in it being less environmentally friendly than the conventional solar PV. This highlights the possibility of future design iterations of these components to rethink their material ecology in terms of their life cycle—materiality, sourcing, and manufacturing, and so forth. The implications of this work suggest questioning, on a case-by-case basis, when and in what contexts integrated solar energy building systems are most plausible. This work also questions the scale at which grid scale distribution should occur.

中文翻译：

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配备传统屋顶或集成聚光光伏的生态生活模块的生命周期评估

气候变化正在破坏我们的环境，一切照旧的做法将无法扭转其影响。本文重点关注建筑部门的影响，特别是，与传统市政公用事业供应相比，它质疑了先进的集成和更传统的建筑应用光伏 (PV) 系统的能源和环境效益。一个名为生态生活模块 (ELM) 的示范项目用于创建这些光伏系统在三个不同气候地点（即纽约市、伦敦和内罗毕）的采用情况的比较生命周期评估 (LCA)。研究结果表明，在整个生命周期中，太阳能系统在减少建筑物对不可再生资源的依赖方面比电网组合做得更好。不出所料，在比较方面，如果当地电网组合的特点是主要是不可再生能源，这些系统会做得更好。比较两个太阳能系统时，先进系统中太阳能电池对环境的影响可以忽略不计，而其结构组件导致其比传统太阳能光伏更不环保。这凸显了这些组件未来设计迭代的可能性，以重新思考其生命周期的材料生态——材料、采购和制造等。这项工作的意义表明，在逐案的基础上，质疑集成太阳能建筑系统何时以及在何种情况下最合理。这项工作还质疑网格规模分布应该发生的规模。