RECAP – EU PVSEC 2026

Details of the EU PVSEC 2026 Event Highlights are coming soon.

Key Advances in Solar Energy Technology This Year

This year’s scientific programme throughout the week presented results showing technological advances across every link of the PV value chain and a range of PV approaches. Among the showcased research were several noteworthy world records in efficiency across different PV technologies.

Crystalline silicon remains at the heart of global PV research and industrial development. TOPCon and Heterojunction technologies featured prominently, alongside continued work on efficiency improvements, advanced processing and metallisation, including efforts to reduce the use of silver. At the same time, reliability is receiving increasing attention, due to the importance of ensuring performance over increasingly long operating lifetimes.

Perovskites and tandem solar cells continue their rapid development, with strong progress in efficiency accompanied by increasing efforts to improve stability, scalability and manufacturing processes. At the same time, characterisation, modelling and outdoor testing are gaining importance for understanding performance and lifetime under real operating conditions, supporting the transition towards commercial deployment.

At the module level, research covered new materials and designs as well as reliability, performance and sustainability. Reducing material consumption and replacing critical resources, including efforts to substitute silver with copper, remain important areas of innovation.

Circularity is becoming increasingly relevant, with research addressing recyclability, repair, reuse and improved end-of-life management. European manufacturing and the resilience of PV supply chains were also prominent topics throughout the week.

The diversity of PV applications continues to expand. In agrivoltaics, regulatory approaches combined energy production with agricultural productivity. Floating PV, building-integrated PV and vehicle-integrated PV further demonstrated the growing range of environments in which photovoltaic technologies can be deployed.

At the system level, the integration of ever-larger volumes of solar electricity is creating new research priorities. Battery storage, flexibility and improved grid management are approaches to address congestion and curtailment. As highlighted in the opening session panel, PV and storage will grow hand in hand as PV continues its rapid expansion.

Socio-economic aspects remain integral to the programme covering inclusiveness, social engagement and the wider societal dimension of the energy transition. An inspiring talk in the closing session reminded the community of the critical role of PV in providing electricity to the millions of people who still lack access, especially in parts of Africa.

“The outstanding results presented throughout the week prove that European collaboration in science works and provides concrete contributions to this transformative technology”, summarises Robert Kenny, Technical Programme Chair.

Digitalisation and AI are established tools throughout the PV value chain, including in system design, modelling and forecasting, performance analysis, fault detection and automated O&M, including the use of drones. At the same time, AI is very rapidly shaping up to be a massive energy consumer - PV has been identified this week as the only real solution to provide the green energy needed to run data centres. Summarised elegantly as, „PV for AI and AI for PV” by Jef Poortmans during the opening session.