A levelized cost of energy approach to select and optimise emerging PV technologies: The relative impact of degradation, cost and initial efficiency

•A levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for emerging photovoltaics (PV) is developed.•Typical degradation profile of Perovskite and Organic PV is taken into account.•Optimal strategies to improve LCOE depend upon present status of PV technology.•LCOE is calculated for literature state-of-the-art Perovskite and Organic PV cells.•Emerging PV have potential to compete with established Silicon PV LCOE. A model of levelized cost of energy (LCOE) is presented which accounts for the significant ‘burn-in’ losses common in photovoltaic (PV) devices with organic (OPV) and perovskite (PVK) absorber layers. This model is used to quantify the relative importance of burn-in, module cost and initial efficiency for a realistic grid-scale PV installation situated in Fiji. The effectiveness of improvements in PV technology in reducing LCOE is shown to depend critically upon the current status of the technology. Predictions of LCOE for specific state-of-the-art OPV and PVK devices sourced from the literature are presented, some of which are shown to have potential to compete at the grid scale. However, devices with state-of-the-art initial efficiencies are not necessarily those with state-of-the-art LCOE, emphasizing the need to characterize lifetime energy yield and for an LCOE approach to select the most promising candidate technologies.