Watt’s the Impact?
Description
Addressing climate change demands not just rapid deployment of renewables like photovoltaics and energy storage, but also intentional design to avoid unintended environmental and social harms. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a vital systems-based tool that quantifies the impacts of materials and technologies—from raw extraction to disposal or reuse.
LCA helps advance low-carbon solutions, circular strategies, and equity by identifying environmental hot spots and trade-offs. Yet it’s often applied too late in the design process, limiting its potential and risking “technology lock-in” from early, unchecked decisions.
This talk introduces life cycle thinking in the context of sustainability, systems thinking, and energy justice. We’ll cover how to interpret LCA results, including spotting red flags and greenwashing, and walk through a solar technology case study showing how methods and processing choices shape outcomes.
Finally, we’ll explore how to embed LCA earlier in design and how we, as a community, can integrate life cycle thinking into our work and daily decisions.
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Speaker Bio
Rachel Woods-Robinson (she/her) is a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington’s Clean Energy Institute (CEI), with a joint appointment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Her research focuses on the environmental and human impacts of emerging technologies to address the climate crisis, including solar photovoltaics and material recovery and recycling. Her interdisciplinary work spans from nanoscale materials discovery to Terawatt-scale strategies for scaling PV toward 2050 net-zero goals.
Rachel earned a BS in Physics from UCLA and a PhD from UC Berkeley as a NSF GRFP and Chancellor’s Fellow, receiving the Ross N. Tucker award for her research on solar cell electrodes using computational chemistry, thin film synthesis, and device fabrication.
She is also passionate about science communication and community engagement. She co-founded Cycle for Science, a program where scientists bike to schools to teach sustainable materials lessons, and she teaches Cycle the Rockies with the Wild Rockies Field Institute, leading undergraduates on a month-long climate and energy-focused bike course across Montana.