Program
Solar Quality Summit Europe 2024

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Opening

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Session 1: Building a brighter future: an integrated approach to lifecycle quality

As much as quality assurance is about avoiding expensive mistakes and helping PV plants to run efficiently, it is also about learning key lessons from when things do go wrong. Ensuring a consistent feedback cycle of learning from across project lifecycles is vital to PV growing at the scale needed to avoid a climate disaster. This session will look at the experience of stakeholders present across a project’s lifecycle and discuss best practice for integrating lessons learned and creating a “quality mindset” in the industry.

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Session 2A: Dynamic plant management – the evolution of O&M

Whereas O&M was once a question of “keeping things ticking over”, the discipline has now evolved into more dynamic plant management, requiring greater flexibility. This demand for greater flexibility is likely to continue as network operators seek to integrate more solar into their grids. This session will focus on how O&M has had to evolve and how the expectations of grid operators are likely to further impact the discipline going forward.

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Session 2B: Boosting the financial performance of your solar asset through energy storage

In several European markets, solar assets fall prey to negative pricing and curtailment, particularly when production schedules do not match demand. This session will look at how storage can boost the financial performance of solar assets, and reduce project risk, assessing the advantages and disadvantages of additional investment in battery storage and best practice for BESS quality assurance.

Coffee Break

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Session 3A: Testing and assessing the market readiness of digital technologies

A key hurdle for new technologies in Europe is bridging the gap between prototype and market readiness. This workshop will explore key innovations from along the whole solar value chain, revealing the results of their performance in the field and assessing their market readiness. This workshop is organised by the TRUST-PV project, powered by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, that looks to improve the performance a reliability of solar power plants.

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Session 3B: Shaping the EU’s innovation strategy on PV circularity and reliability

This workshop will explore how the EU’s Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda can be shaped to find solutions to challenges around quality assurance, improved field performance, the bankability of assets, and issues surrounding warranty and contractual terms of PV, identified in the ETIP PV Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), and look for potential solutions.

Lunch Break

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Session 4: Crash course and Q&A: Europe’s hottest markets

In 2022 the European solar industry surpassed all previous deployment records, installing almost 42 GW of new capacity throughout the year. During this session, SolarPower Europe will present the findings of their latest European Market Outlook for solar, tracking the progress of the continent’s largest markets and identifying those new markets that are shaking up the established solar order.

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Session 5: Crash course Q&A: The cost of doing solar

Solar PV has one of the lowest levelised costs of electricity (LCOE) of any energy source, but what are the factors that have contributed to this and how has the European market responded to these developments? This presentation will focus on the cost of solar, providing market insights on the cost of raw materials, key components and their effects on solar’s (LCOE), as well as analysing the cost of capital for solar projects in the EU.

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Business Matchmaking Session

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Session 6: Crash course and Q&A: Effective energy trading practices

Energy and electricity trading are technically complex and can put less-experienced operators off entering wholesale markets. However, it can provide an important source of revenue for companies and projects. This presentation will focus on the fundamentals of energy trading, including price volatility, hedging, locational marginal pricing, and trading on the wholesale, spot, and day ahead markets.

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Session 7: Deriving value from M&A

Mergers and acquisitions are an important tool in value creation and can secure crucial financing for planned pipelines of solar projects. Key to realising these benefits is structuring these deals properly. This presentation will give participants key insights on how to create value through the M&A process and an oversight of the tools to enact successful transactions.

Coffee Break

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Business Matchmaking Session

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Session 8: When the curtain falls – exploring in End-of-Life management for solar

In this session, SolarPower Europe will launch the new Solar PV End-of-Life Best Practice Guidelines. End-of-Life management of PV plants and their components, along with product circularity is becoming an increasing focus of industry and politics. At EU level, there are several directives covering waste electrical and electronic equipment, and this regulatory framework is currently undergoing further development. SolarPower Europe has developed industry first End-of-Life Best Practice Guidelines for solar to help companies comply with and even go beyond existing and upcoming legislation.

Networking Drinks

Dinner and Networking

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Session 1A: Actions speak louder than words – implementing supply chain sustainability audits into your procurement strategy

The importance of supply chain sustainability cannot be understated and has rightly grown in importance. Led by SolarPower Europe in partnership with Solar Energy UK (SEUK), stakeholders from across the solar value chain have worked to create the Solar Stewardship Initiative (SSI), ensuring industry takes responsibility in leading the charge on this key issue. The Solar Quality Summit falls on the eve of the first supply chain audits to be carried out under the SSI and this session will focus on how you can implement these in your procurement strategy, the standards required, and the opportunity to become an SSI auditor.

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Session 1B: ChatGPT for solar – the opportunities for improving efficiency presented by AI

With the advent of ever-more powerful AI tools, it is clear that this technology is here to stay. The key question facing the solar industry is, what are the key opportunities and risks associated with AI? From yield forecasting and predictive maintenance to contractual agreements and analysis of legislation, this panel will look at use cases for AI in the rapidly growing solar industry, identifying ways that it can contribute to more effective quality assurance, and the limitations of what it can do.

Session 2: Sponsored Technology Workshop

Coffee Break

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Business Matchmaking Session

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Session 3A: Preventive mitigation measures for more accurate PV plant design

The accuracy of plant design is vital to realising a bankable project that performs to expectations. This workshop will focus on how the risks inherent in power plant design can be mitigated and how quality assurance can be built into the planning phase of a PV project. This workshop is organised by the TRUST-PV project, powered by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, that looks to improve the performance a reliability of solar power plants.

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Session 3B: Mapping key decisions and workflows along the PV value chain

The key to understanding the cost of quality is understanding how decisions taken along the value chain can influence workflows within a project. This workshop will aim to map the decisions of each stakeholder. It will build on work done by the IEA PVPS Task 13 working group and the results will be used to calculate the impact of decisions and how the workflow can be changed to improve quality along the value chain.

Lunch Break and Closing Address