Towards Dynamic Life Cycle Assessment of Solar Energy Systems: An IoT Data Infrastructure with Hash-Chained Provenance and Stakeholder-Prioritised Indicators
Open Access
Abstract
Life cycle assessment (LCA) of photovoltaic systems rests largely on aggregated, time-invariant inventories. In Colombia, registered solar projects grew by 128.6% between 2018–2022 and 2022–2025, while environmental follow-up remains self-reported and semi-annual. We report IMPACT Energy.CO, a data infrastructure designed to enable dynamic LCA and installed in the production environment of the national hydrocarbons agency. It normalises heterogeneous telemetry onto a versioned vocabulary, hash-chains derived indicators and includes a headless openLCA connector. It was tested before the transfer and its telemetry path was exercised against a test instance only; no field telemetry has entered an inventory and no telemetry-to-openLCA run is evidenced, so the evidence supports an enabling proof of concept. Of 144 candidates, 32 indicators were screened; experts scored all 32 and communities 24. On fifteen shared social indicators, scored with non-equivalent instruments, the two rankings show no resolvable association (); in exploratory analysis the expert ranking is ordered by stakeholder category (Kendall’s ). Under an explicit criterion, energy and carbon payback time, ranked second and third by the experts, are the only screened environmental indicators an assessment engine cannot return as results. Re-scaling published values of the International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme to Caribbean irradiance lowers the generation-normalised global warming potential of monocrystalline silicon modules by 32% (95% propagation interval 20–42%), and carbon payback varies three- to four-fold across official grid emission factors.
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Funding Information
- Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos (Contract No. 515 of 2025)
- Universidad del Magdalena (Resolución 0159 de 2025)
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