PARALLEL EVENTS PROGRAMME 2026

Join us for a practical, in-person workshop focused on the financial management of EU-funded projects, with a particular emphasis on Horizon Europe. This interactive session is designed for professionals involved in the day-to-day financial, administrative, or coordination aspects of EU projects, both coordinators and project partners, who wish to strengthen compliance, efficiency, and audit preparedness. Participation in the workshop is restricted to a limited number of participants to ensure individual attention, hands-on exercises, and meaningful peer exchange. A WIP-stamped certificate of attendance will be issued to all workshop participants.

Join us for a hands-on, interactive workshop designed to improve your EU projects proposal writing skills, with a focus on Horizon Europe. We will guide you through the key steps of transforming your initial project idea into a compelling proposal and provide practical tips for shaping proposals that stand out, with an emphasis on the impact section. As a cherry on the cake, a dedicated Ask-Me-Anything session with our Senior Experts and European Commission evaluators will help answer your specific questions. The content is tailored to both beginners and those with some experience in proposal writing. Participation in the workshop is restricted to a limited number of participants to ensure individual attention and meaningful exchange. A WIP-stamped certificate of attendance will be issued to workshop participants.

The PV Academy is an educational format which will give a deep insight into selected PV research & development topics and supports the global PV community with the mission:

• to educate about the fundamentals of different PV technologies
• to facilitate newcomers in the field to understand and contribute to PV research as well as follow talks at PV specialist conferences
• to summarize and contextualize the latest developments in PV research
• to give graduates and educators the opportunity to refresh and update their knowledge

Solar energy’s continued growth requires industry to have confidence in 1) the cross-climate performance of emergent, high-efficiency technologies; 2) the accuracy of irradiance and other measurements needed for yield projections; and 3) the identification of local contributors to long-term reliability. This session, hosted by the international R&D collaborative, PV CAMPER, underscores the importance of globally coordinated research and how the latter plays a key role in collecting data critical to the world’s solar industry. The panelists, all members of PV CAMPER, will address provocative topics ranging from perovskite deployment to climatic stressors to system and component reliability.

Join us at EU PVSEC 2026 for a high level China EU summit focused on PV sustainability and innovation across the entire lifecycle – with a strong emphasis on global green supply chain collaboration.

Explore how cross border partnerships are advancing breakthrough PV integration in agrivoltaics, desert restoration, aquavoltaics, floating PV, and energy hubs – while carefully managing environmental interactions and impacts.

Hear from Chinese industry leaders and top international research institutes about real world practices that balance performance, circular economy, and ecological responsibility throughout the PV lifecycle.

Engage in strategic dialogues on global green supply chain alignment, Digital Product Passports, eco design, and public acceptance – working together to build truly sustainable and scalable PV solutions.

Don't miss this unique opportunity to co create the future of solar, where innovation goes hand in hand with environmental stewardship, and global collaboration brings green supply chains to life.

This session marks the official launch of SolarPower Europe’s “State of Play: Industrial Policy for Solar PV – National Implementation and Progress Report”, providing a first comparative assessment of how EU Member States are implementing resilience under the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA) for solar PV manufacturing. It will present benchmarked evidence on the application of resilience in public procurement (Art. 25), renewable energy auctions (Art. 26), and public support schemes (Art. 28) across Member States. Ahead of the adoption of the Industrial Accelerator Act, the session will also showcase early approaches to “Made in Europe” requirements in selected countries. The presentation of findings will be followed by a high-level panel discussion with policymakers, industry representatives, and national stakeholders to discuss what works in practice, where challenges persist, and how swift and effective national implementation can strengthen Europe’s solar manufacturing base while safeguarding deployment speed and competitiveness.

Innovation in the energy transition depends not only on technology and research excellence, but also on our ability to create environments where diverse perspectives can contribute, collaborate, and thrive.
Many organisations invest heavily in innovation processes while overlooking one of the most critical drivers of high-performing teams and breakthrough thinking: inclusive human behaviour.
This Solar + Leaders ecosystem signature workshop explores how leadership practices, team culture, communication patterns, integrity, psychological safety, and systems thinking influence collaboration, creativity, experimentation, and innovation outcomes across the solar and renewable energy sectors.
Participants will reflect on how inclusion, diversity of perspectives, and bias awareness strengthen collective intelligence, improve problem-solving capacity, and support healthier and more resilient innovation ecosystems. Through practical exercises and facilitated discussions grounded in real-world energy transition challenges, the workshop will examine the leadership behaviours that help transform diversity into meaningful participation and innovation impact.
Designed for researchers, innovators, industry professionals, and ecosystem builders, the session aims to strengthen the human and leadership competencies required to build more collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing teams across the PV sector.

Key Themes

• Inclusion and diversity as drivers of innovation and high-performing teams
• Psychological safety, trust, and the human dynamics behind high-performing and inclusive teams
• Bias awareness and collective intelligence
• Cross-sector and interdisciplinary collaboration
• Integrity-led leadership and systems thinking in innovation ecosystems

The Parallel Event “Opportunities for Sustainable Perovskite PV Commercialisation” will focus on discussions in the following areas:

• Key requirements to market uptake, including technology upscaling, pilot line development, manufacturing constraints, resource and equipment needs, as well as lessons learned from ongoing EU projects.
• Sustainable and circular value chains for wide deployment: The role of circular economy approaches in enabling resilient European supply chains, addressing material availability, recycling pathways and long-term sustainability.
• Life Cycle Assessment and acceptability: Insights from LCA, LCC and sLCA on current perovskite technologies, including stability and durability, and their implications for industry adoption and ESG requirements.
• Policies and framework conditions for commercialisation: Alignment with EU policies and regulatory frameworks, including standards, certification and testing needs required to ensure safe, compliant and scalable deployment.

The event will be tailored for a diverse target audience interested in the topics new PV technologies – Sustainability – Commercialization and will include:

• Industry representatives from the PV manufacturing and solar energy sectors, including materials and equipment manufacturing, PV producers and recycling companies.
• Policymakers, regulatory bodies, EU funding bodies focused on energy, sustainability, circular economy.
• Innovators exploring perovskite integration into sectors like mobility, agriculture, construction.
• Entrepreneurs and startups are working on sustainable energy solutions.

Research scientists focusing on perovskite and solar cell technologies.

Photovoltaic (PV) systems require monitoring and performance metrics to verify that they are performing as expected. Accurate monitoring and performance assessment metrics enable confidence in investments, timely detection of faults, and are essential for the optimisation of PV system performance. Nevertheless, there are significant challenges regarding the use of various types of environmental sensors, the use of the different forms of performance metrics and the related uncertainties of all of the above. Reported values of performance metrics might not reflect complete confidence in the results, which depend on weather and monitoring system specifications. Furthermore, standard indicators and monitoring requirements are not adapted to different types of installation (bifacial, rooftop, etc.). The ability to select appropriate sensors and performance metrics and quantify the propagation of uncertainties from sensors to performance metrics is critical towards the design of cost-effective monitoring for different types of PV systems. The above topics have significant financial implications for PV system developers, owners and asset managers, as unexpected variations in performance ratio can translate to millions in penalties or financial losses.
This workshop is organised by the EURAMET SOLiD-PV project and aims to facilitate the exchange of insights among stakeholders, consortium members, and industry leaders. The target audience is the academic community and industry in the areas of PV systems, irradiance monitoring, PV systems optimisation, and PV systems standards. The event will consist of an initial round of short presentations, followed by a panel discussion with audience participation.

A solar cell or panel may perform perfectly in the laboratory but once deployed, wind, dust, temperature and moisture can change output, stress the module, and shorten lifetime. These circumstances accelerate the degradation of new materials like perovskites.
What if we could predict real-world performance while it is still in the lab? With AI models we can connect the different levels but it is a difficult exercise because it involves different scales with multiple physics, spans multiple time scales and the absence of real life data to train the AI models y. The use of formula’s in is applied in the CETP project Upscale to connect models of these different levels of the physical world.
What if we do have real life data collected from applications in the field? How do we validate and interpretate the findings or predict future performance? At Solar Beat (Solar Building Elements Application Testing) and advanced measurement, of over a thousand sensors, and secure infrastructure exists that increasingly applies the latest AI models for its analysis.

The PV Plant of 2035: From Design to Daily Operation is a joint parallel event organised by DTU/SOLARIS, EURAC Research/SUPERNOVA and UPM/PVOP.

The event brings together three Horizon Europe projects to present a shared vision for next-generation PV plants in the Terawatt era.

The session follows the digital and operational value chain, from field-level monitoring hardware to software tools and data integration.

The hardware part will address improved plant observability through innovative low-cost sensing concepts presented by Tekniker/SOLARIS.

The software part will address advanced plant operation through solar tracker control software for undulating terrain by UPM/PVOP.

The data management part will present the SUPERNOVA PV Data Space as a secure and sovereign infrastructure for data exchange across the PV sector.

Through short inputs and audience interaction, the event will show how European R&I is enabling PV plants that are more observable, digitally integrated and efficient to operate.

Current power systems increasingly include significant levels of distributed PV generation, with climate targets driving further growth. As a result, many applications require accurate estimates or forecasts of the aggregated PV output and feed-in of a given portfolio (e.g. congestion management, market bidding, dispatching, reserve sizing, and integration studies).

Modelling and forecasting the aggregate output of an entire regional fleet requires dedicated approaches beyond traditional site-level workflows, accounting for factors such as spatial distribution and technical characteristics of the systems comprised in a fleet, as well as handling inherent data availability limitations (e.g. plant-level generation or descriptive metadata on the many plants contributing to overall feed-in).

This workshop provides a concise introduction to regional PV modelling and forecasting, its specificities, and its role in powers system applications. Building on ongoing work within IEA PVPS Task 16, and contributions from invited speakers, it will present the state of the art, a comparison of different approaches, emerging needs, and how improved regional PV data can support more reliable and efficient power system operation.

Most photovoltaic (PV) production is currently concentrated in China. Changing geopolitical conditions and growing concerns about sustainability and energy independence are increasing the desire to restore solar manufacturing in Europe. This raises an important question about how PV production can return to the Netherlands and the wider EU. It also challenges us to consider how Europe can become competitive again in this global market. During this parallel session, we aim to highlight the Dutch SolarNL consortium working to rebuild a strong PV manufacturing ecosystem. The consortium also seeks to strengthen Europe’s knowledge and innovation position in solar technology. The session will provide a platform for collaboration, discussion, and the exchange of experiences. Our goal is to inspire participants and share valuable lessons for the future of European PV production.

TKI Urban Energy & Nationaal Consortium Zon in Landschap

The National Consortium Solar in Landscape has been active since early 2018 to bring together parties involved in solar in the Dutch landscape in order to achieve better coordination and gain a clearer view of the (near) future developments. To this end, scientists, project developers, financial service providers, designers, consultants, knowledge institutions, and the government work together harmoniously.

The consortium focuses on building and sharing experiences. Knowledge regarding onshore solar parks used to be scarce globally. To obtain answers to research questions surrounding solar energy in the landscape, we focus on the following themes:

• What is the impact on soil life?
• Can the solar parks increase biodiversity?
• Can they be made attractive to local residents? Perhaps by visually integrating the parks into the landscape?
• Can these aesthetic challenges be translated into technical aspects, such as shape, color, and size?
• Can solar energy be combined with agriculture?
• Can synergy be created through innovative designs? Can the parks be integrated into the electricity grid?
• How can electricity demand be matched with supply?

The consortium organizes a meeting twice a year featuring contributions from members and guest speakers regarding current developments, new initiatives, and interim research results.

In this parallel event on the EU PVSEC we would like to share our latest findings and achievements with a larger public.

PV modeling is used during all stages of PV projects, including pre-feasibility studies, plant layout optimization, and management of operational assets. Modeling tools for all aspects of photovoltaic systems are rapidly growing, with Python having become the main scientific language for open-source PV modeling. This tutorial will focus on teaching attendees PV modeling in Python through pvlib.

In this interactive workshop, we will go from getting acquainted with solar resource data to modeling the AC energy output of a single-axis tracker system. This includes learning and simulating sun position, plane-of-array irradiance, temperature models, and inverter output. We will review common vocabulary around Python and PV performance modeling. The tutorial will finalize with an overview of other available open-source tools for other aspects of modeling PV systems and data science in the PV field.

Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) presents a unique opportunity to transform buildings into energy-generating assets while aligning with climate-responsive architectural design. ISA’s ongoing work—including the climate-tailored BIPV guidebook and global case-study compendium—demonstrates that BIPV solutions must be adapted to diverse climatic conditions, ranging from tropical humidity and coastal corrosion to desert heat, dust, and snow loads.

However, despite its strong potential, BIPV adoption remains limited globally, with deployment largely concentrated in niche projects. Evidence from ISA’s work highlights that scale-up is constrained not only by policy and finance, but critically by technology readiness gaps, fragmented value chains, and weak manufacturing ecosystems—particularly in the Global South.

At the same time, BIPV systems require high levels of integration across architecture, materials, and PV engineering, creating additional complexity in product standardization, performance validation, and delivery. These challenges are further amplified in emerging markets due to limited local manufacturing capacities, dependence on imports, and lack of standardized testing and certification pathways.

EU PVSEC 2026 provides an important platform to convene global experts to discuss how climate-specific design considerations intersect with technology innovation and manufacturing constraints, and to define actionable pathways for scaling BIPV in diverse geographies.

This parallel event, organized by IEA PVPS Task 12, will highlight the latest advancements in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) for photovoltaic technologies. Task 12 experts will present updated state of the art inventory datasets (covering modern cell, module, and Balance of System components), alongside several specific LCA studies such as recycling pathways, emerging technologies or applications.... In addition to technical presentations, the event will feature a panel discussion dedicated to emerging LCI/LCA developments and their implications for PV deployment; exploring how improved datasets, harmonized methodologies, and transparent environmental metrics can shape decision making, strengthen sustainability claims, and support the global scaling of photovoltaic systems.

Recent price increase of fossil fuels is putting pressure on the acceleration of PV generated electrification of the transport sector to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels. PVCS is a realistic option of charging electric vehicles using PV electricity, especially in combination with battery storage. Additionally, VIPV applications are developing from PV integration into passenger vehicles towards integration into heavy duty vehicles (HDV) such as trucks, trailers and buses. Also, in combination with non-electrified vehicles, e.g. ICE vehicles, VIPV is a realistic environmental and economical option for reducing fossil fuel consumption. Besides, VIPV and PVCS can be used as a source of power supply under emergency conditions.
By recognizing these values, PV integration into the transport sector is expected to gain a strong foothold in the European market, supporting the transition towards green transport and subsequently expanding globally.
In this session, approaches for accelerating the market penetration of VIPV and PVCS will be discussed.

As a joint activity of the IEA TCP's Wind, Hydrogen and PVPS, the Task 20 was developed with the goal of advancing variable renewable energy (VRE) systems for the production of green hydrogen and take into account the and regional circumstances and innovation dynamics of this development. The emerging market for green hydrogen, with its potential for multi usage, offers a new roadmap for the deployment of large scale solar in robust, integrated hybrid systems and local energy hubs. The common goal is to develop integrated design, control, electronics and standardization practices, validated by a diversity of use cases, which will in turn inform industry and policy makers how to improve economic and regulatory conditions for the large scale deployment.

TKI Urban Energy

In the past years, the Netherlands made important steps towards a more circular PV value chain. There are several module manufacturers active with a strong focus on circular PV. The SolarNL consortium has circularity as one of its pillars. And both public procurement and subsidy schemes are more and more incorporating non-price criteria like a low carbon footprint or exclusion of hazardous materials. In this parallel session we would like to give a stage to these frontrunners and exchange experiences with other countries on this topic.

Rebuilding a competitive photovoltaic manufacturing base in Europe has become a strategic priority for energy transition and industrial resilience. Achieving “PV Made in Europe” requires not only technological innovation, but also stronger collaboration across the PV manufacturing value chain, closer coordination between industrial players, and effective pathways for manufacturing optimisation and industrial scale-up.
This session, jointly organised by the Horizon Europe projects EMPOWER and SHINE PV, will bring together industrial companies and technology developers to discuss how European actors can work together to build competitive PV manufacturing ecosystems. The session will primarily focus on industrial perspectives, while also reflecting insights from applied research and innovation activities.
Through short technical insights and an industry-focused panel discussion, the session will explore the key challenges companies face when scaling PV manufacturing in Europe. Drawing on examples from the EMPOWER and SHINE PV projects, industrial partners will share their perspectives on supply chain coordination, manufacturing optimisation, and the conditions required to strengthen collaboration across the European PV value chain.

The discussion will focus particularly on the industrial perspective, addressing key questions such as:

• How can actors across the PV value chain collaborate more effectively to build competitive PV manufacturing in Europe?
• What are the main bottlenecks for scaling PV manufacturing in Europe?
• How can innovation projects help connect industrial actors and strengthen supply chains?

Audience participation will be encouraged through interactive discussion and live polling to capture perspectives from the wider PV community.

This parallel event will cover of battery energy storage systems (BESS) in PV power plants, BESS technologies, key use cases, and methods to assess performance, degradation, lifetime and reliability based on operational data. Speakers of the IEA PVPS Task 13 collaboration will share practical experience on operating battery systems in different environments and applications. A panel discussion will link findings to broader PV and storage work within PVPS.

The workshop targets researchers, industry, policymakers and standardisation bodies.

The objectives of this PVPS Task 13 Workshop are:

• Provide a review of the technologies and main use cases of battery systems in Solar Power Plants today
• Discuss efficient methods for assessing the performance and reliability of battery systems in Solar Power Plants in operation

Exchange operational experience from several such systems in Operation

The European Technology and Innovation Platform for Photovoltaics (ETIP PV) plays a key role in defining Europe’s photovoltaic research and innovation priorities through its Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), which it has developed together with the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA). Building on the technology pathways identified in the SRIA, this workshop will provide a platform for the PV research and innovation community to discuss how funding approaches, application processes, and prioritisation mechanisms can better reflect technology needs along the innovation chain. A targeted discussion, potentially involving the Implementation Working Group (IWG), will explore the differences and complementarities between national and EU funding programmes, providing insights into how these frameworks interact and how improved alignment can help shorten innovation cycles and strengthen Europe’s technological leadership in photovoltaics. Moving beyond strategic discussion, the event aims to foster an operational dialogue among researchers, industry stakeholders, and ETIP PV community members on translating SRIA priorities into tangible innovation progress.

As PV deployment accelerates globally, storage is increasingly seen as a key enabler of system integration. However, its role varies significantly depending on context, including grid support, self-consumption, hybrid systems and coordinated system configurations.
This event will explore how storage contributes to higher PV penetration, what technical and operational challenges remain, and which market and policy frameworks are needed to make PV plus storage scalable and bankable. The session will bring together perspectives from different IEA PVPS Tasks and external experts, combining technical, economic and policy insights.

Session 1 – Technical integration: how storage supports higher PV penetration

• Role of storage in increasing PV hosting capacity and reducing curtailment
• Storage services for grid support, flexibility and system integration
• Forecasting and operational optimisation in high-PV systems
• PV plus storage in weak grids, off-grid and hybrid systems
• Technical questions related to sizing, dispatch, control strategies and seasonal feasibility

Session 2 – Value, business models and policy: making PV plus storage scalable

• Business models for PV plus storage, including self-consumption and aggregation
• Bankability, revenue stacking and risk allocation
• Policy and regulatory frameworks enabling PV plus storage deployment
• Role of storage in hybrid systems and sector coupling