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Sustainable Solar Power Systems and Applications
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Sustainable Solar Power Systems and Applications

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Energy Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2026 | Viewed by 829

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Yeu-Long Jiang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Graduate Institute of Optoelectronic Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung 40227, Taiwan
Interests: silicon thin-film solar cells; silicon heterojunction solar cells; PV system design, evaluation, and diagnosis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Kuei-Hsiang Chao

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung 41170, Taiwan
Interests: diagnosis of PV systems; maximum power point tracking of PV arrays; development of energy storage systems; power electronics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable solar power systems and applications aim to deliver reliable, clean energy while upholding environmental stewardship, social equity, and economic sustainability. Their scope encompasses electricity generation, resource extraction and manufacturing, installation and operation, and decommissioning and recycling.

This Special Issue is grounded on the premise that sustainability challenges are interconnected. Advances in materials science must consider end-of-life recycling; large-scale deployment must account for land-use competition and ecosystem impacts; and the benefits of the solar revolution must be fairly distributed across societies.

In this Special Issue, we invite original research and review articles that advance solar sustainability. We encourage interdisciplinary contributions that bridge the technical, environmental, and social sciences. Research areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • High-efficiency tandem solar cells,
  • Bifacial panels,
  • Building-integrated PV (BIPV),
  • Solar skins for esthetic integration,
  • Reducing energy payback time,
  • Floating solar photovoltaics (FPV),
  • Agrivoltaics,
  • Hybrid systems,
  • Short- and long-duration energy storage,
  • Grid stability,
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for predictive maintenance, output forecasting, and fault detection,
  • Digital twins for system optimization and lifetime extension,
  • Next-generation solar tracking algorithms to maximize energy harvest,
  • Solar energy in hard-to-abate sectors,
  • Energy justice,
  • Community-owned solar models,
  • Policies improving access for marginalized and underserved communities,
  • Sustainable supply chains and responsible material sourcing.

Dr. Yeu-Long Jiang
Prof. Dr. Kuei-Hsiang Chao
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • sustainable solar energy
  • advanced photovoltaic materials
  • bifacial solar panels
  • building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPVs)
  • tandem solar cells
  • agrivoltaics
  • floating photovoltaics (FPVs)
  • energy storage integration
  • smart energy systems
  • artificial intelligence (AI) in solar energy
  • grid integration
  • system optimization
  • community solar energy
  • solar decarbonization
  • sustainable development goals (SDGs)

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (2 papers)

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23 pages, 4189 KB  
Article
DARE-YOLO: A Lightweight Object Detection Algorithm and Its FPGA Acceleration for Sustainable PV Panel Inspection
by Yuchuan Yang, Feng Xing, Caiyan Qin, Shuxu Chen, Hyundong Shin and Sungyoung Lee
Sustainability 2026, 18(10), 4999; https://doi.org/10.3390/su18104999 - 15 May 2026
Viewed by 86
Abstract
As a critical component of sustainable energy systems, the efficient maintenance of photovoltaic (PV) panels is essential. While deep learning is an important approach for PV panel defect detection, the high complexity of existing models and their substantial computational demand make deployment on [...] Read more.
As a critical component of sustainable energy systems, the efficient maintenance of photovoltaic (PV) panels is essential. While deep learning is an important approach for PV panel defect detection, the high complexity of existing models and their substantial computational demand make deployment on edge platforms difficult. This paper studies an acceleration method for photovoltaic panel defect detection on the Zynq-7020 heterogeneous platform. We design DARE-YOLO, a lightweight network for photovoltaic panel defect detection, together with a Zynq-based accelerator. In DARE-YOLO, we introduce RepConv and a lightweight single-path backbone to reduce the memory bandwidth overhead caused by multi-branch structures. We further design a Dilated Context Block (DCB) and a Dual-scale Decoupled Head (DDH), which effectively improve the detection accuracy of DARE-YOLO. On the Zynq platform, we develop the accelerator through a mixed fixed-point quantization strategy, a custom convolution IP core, and pipeline unrolling. These optimizations reduce data access latency, improve computational parallelism, and increase computational throughput. Experimental results show that DARE-YOLO achieves 93.84% mAP@0.5 with only 6.4 M parameters. The accelerator has a total on-board power consumption of only 1.95 W, while delivering a throughput of 37.5 GOPS, an energy efficiency of 19.23 GOPS/W. The image inference latency is 661.3 ms. This low-power, high-efficiency co-design paradigm ensures the long-term reliability of renewable energy facilities. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Solar Power Systems and Applications)
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23 pages, 2346 KB  
Article
Sustainability Benefit Ratio: Bridging Environmental Metrics and Economic Feasibility for Circular Remanufacturing of Perovskite Solar Cells
by Tomohiko Nakajima, Yuuki Kitanaka and Masayuki Fukuda
Sustainability 2026, 18(6), 2796; https://doi.org/10.3390/su18062796 - 12 Mar 2026
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 340
Abstract
Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are approaching large-scale deployment, yet short lifetimes and end-of-life risks make circular strategies essential. Here we propose a time-resolved Sustainability Benefit Ratio (SBR), a dimensionless indicator that aggregates (i) physically accounted greenhouse-gas emissions/avoidance and (ii) monetized life-cycle costs converted [...] Read more.
Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are approaching large-scale deployment, yet short lifetimes and end-of-life risks make circular strategies essential. Here we propose a time-resolved Sustainability Benefit Ratio (SBR), a dimensionless indicator that aggregates (i) physically accounted greenhouse-gas emissions/avoidance and (ii) monetized life-cycle costs converted to CO2-equivalent via an economic carbon-intensity coefficient (CC), enabling a unified assessment of environmental performance and economic burdens over time. This work highlights design for remanufacturing as a key enabler of circular PSC deployment. Using an industrially relevant carbon-based PSC architecture designed for remanufacturing, we simulate multi-cycle operation under periodic remanufacturing and repeated new manufacturing, and derive an analytic steady-state limit, SBRss. Remanufacturing markedly increases long-run circular value relative to renewal replacement under realistic lifetimes, while conventional payback economic indicators diverge in timing, motivating an explicit bridge between environmental payback and economic feasibility. We therefore introduce a circular value weighting factor β applied only to CC-converted terms, where β = 0 recovers a purely physical CO2-based benefit-to-burden ratio, and β-sweeps transparently represent stakeholder-dependent emphasis on valuation-weighted burdens/credits. Finally, feasibility-constrained design maps and Bayesian optimization demonstrate that SBRss can serve as a practical objective function to efficiently explore economically viable remanufacturing specifications and identify dominant design levers governing circular value. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Solar Power Systems and Applications)
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