The LCA team is currently conducting an environmental assessment of the power inverter developed in SCAPE.

This study evaluates not only greenhouse gas emissions but also considers water use, metal and mineral consumption, and 13 additional environmental categories—technically known as impact categories.

Using a cradle-to-grave approach, we estimate the environmental impacts across the full life cycle of the device: from the extraction of raw materials for manufacturing to electricity losses tied to efficiency during operation, and finally, to the recycling phase at the power inverter’s end-of-life.

Despite the inverter’s high efficiency (above 95%), our findings indicate that electricity losses still contribute significantly across nearly all environmental impact categories. This highlights the urgent importance of accelerating the decarbonisation of our energy system in the short-medium term for a reduction in emissions, not only in CO2, but in all considered emissions.

We also analysed the power inverter itself and identified hotspots related to its material electronic needs, with energy-intensive components such as transistors and integrated circuits emerging as the main sources of emissions.

Encouragingly, our preliminary results show that the greenhouse gas emissions per kWh are comparable to those of commercial devices reported in the literature. The next steps in our research will involve evaluating potential technical improvements in design, aiming to enhance efficiency further, and benchmarking the SCAPE device against a commercially available alternative using first-hand data.