Brightcon 2025, hackathon & courses in Grenoble and online

To facilitate the upscaling of LCA studies, so-called Product Category Template (PCT) data sets are developed and the photovoltaics (PV) product group is taken as an applicable example. We will present the contents and the workflows for PCTs, which can simplify life cycle modeling and increase the comparability and compliance of its results. The open-source file of only a few megabytes in size can be directly imported in compatible LCA tools and is available in ILCD format, OLCA (JSON-LD) format, or as an immutable openLCA library.
Each PCT includes the needed biosphere (e.g. from ecoinvent), impact assessment methods (e.g. the Environmental Footprint 3.1 method), automated calculations of additional indicators for the product group of interest, (e.g. the energy payback time for photovoltaics PCT), modular life cycle stages following EN15804, linked and pre-defined unit processes that support compliance with different standards (e.g. EN15804 compliance in general and IEA-PVPS 2020 Guideline compliance for photovoltaics in particular), customizable core parameters for calculations and to fulfill the correct declared or functional unit of the product category (e.g. photovoltaics module lifetime, efficiency, irradiation), background EPD results from publicly available sources that support the product category, as well as selected links to background data sets from commercial databases (e.g. from ecoinvent) to facilitate the connection of the foreground.
We will show that modeling efforts are drastically reduced and LCA practitioners can fully focus on their section of interest, which might be very specific parts of the product group (e.g. the solar cell absorber production). In cases where no primary data is available, background data sets (e.g. from ecoinvent) can be very quickly selected from the pre-defined provider lists, which avoids additional modeling requirements. However, the practitioner can also link own custom models to the fixed foreground system.
We want to make these PCTs available open-source, so that development and update routines can be tracked via a versioning system (e.g. the Collaboration Server or GitHub), which allows improvements and corrections of the PCT over time. Using the PCT avoids modeling from scratch, it can facilitate the modeling compliance with given standards, it can increase the upscaling of available LCA data for similar products, and it consists of pre-defined structures that allows for easier review and verification of third-parties. The concept is like a simplified tool inside a data file.
The presentation will focus on the concept of the PCT, the structure of the LCA data behind and will show practical use cases, as well as practical calculation examples from the LCA modeling inside the PCT. This work is done within the framework of the Horizon Europe Project Hi-BITS (hi-bits.eu). The concept for so-called Product Category Templates (PCTs) can be generally applied to other product categories of interest and is currently developed for a PCT on hydrogen storage systems.