Tellurium, which is mostly demanded to manufacture solar photovoltaic cells, presents the highest risk. To overcome these constraints, measures consisting on improving recycling rates from 0. 6% per year could avoid material shortages or restrictions in green technologies.
Green technologies require huge amounts of many different raw materials. A methodology is presented to identify possible material bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are assessed through reserves, resources and production data. Annual increase in metal recycling rates to offset bottlenecks is calculated. 1. Introduction
Technologies which are affected by these bottlenecks are solar photovoltaic, with indium, gallium, selenium, tellurium and silver requirements, electric vehicles, that need cobalt, lithium, molybdenum and gallium among others, wind power which demands permanent magnets (i.e. REE) and solar thermal power that requires silver and molybdenum.
By means of the bottom up approach explained in Section 2.1, data of maximum production peaks using resources data have been calculated ( Table 3 ). For the materials shown in Table 3, estimated demand exceeds production before 2050, therefore a possible bottleneck can be identified.
In addition, in the context of specific events, the government's macro-control and financial support have also promoted the further development of photovoltaic power generation technology and reduced the cost of solar cell power generation . 6. Conclusions and future perspectives
Solar Photovoltaics, . Fig. 4. Demand projections for green technologies: a) yearly installed power and b) cumulative power of wind, solar PV and CSP technologies; c) yearly sales of vehicles and d) world fleet evolution for ICEV, PHEV and BEV.
Still, some of the elements that in this paper were identified to generate bottlenecks, such as cobalt, gallium and indium, are considered critical in almost all of the analyzed reports, emphasizing their relevance in this and in other sectors of the economy .
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