13:00–15:30

"AI for PV: Tools & Examples Across the Value Chain and Product Life Cycle"

Dr. Pierre-Jean Alet, CSEM | Prof. Tonio Buonnassisi, CSEM & MIT

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming relevant to photovoltaics, but its most valuable uses are often application-specific and require careful integration with domain expertise. This 2.5-hour tutorial will provide a practical introduction to how AI can support the PV innovation and deployment lifecycle, from research and development to manufacturing, field operations, and grid integration. The emphasis will be on actionable workflows rather than general AI theory, with examples chosen to reflect real challenges in PV research and industry.

The tutorial will cover concrete use cases including experimental design, defect and failure analysis, manufacturing-variance reduction, performance monitoring, production forecasting, and congestion management. These examples will illustrate where AI can accelerate learning, reveal patterns in complex data, and support decision-making under uncertainty. They will also highlight important limitations, including data quality, low-data regimes, model validation, interpretability, and the risks of over-reliance on automated outputs.

Participants will learn practical workflows for building bespoke AI tools with frontier models, including how to structure data, design prompts, check outputs, integrate expert review, and keep humans in the loop. The session will conclude with a hands-on activity in which participants apply these concepts to a representative PV problem. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of where AI is useful in PV today, where caution is required, and how to design AI workflows that improve learning speed & quality in PV research & industrial practice.

If you want to contribute to the EU PVSEC, there are many ways to do so: