As Europe's photovoltaic capacity moves from megawatt to gigawatt scale, the industry is entering a new phase in which lifetime performance matters as much as installation speed. That was the central message of a recent SolarPower Europe webinar, "Quality across the PV lifecycle: Building Europe's solar fleet for the next 30 years," which brought together experts from industry, research and the Horizon Europe SUPERNOVA project.
From lowest cost to lifetime value
Opening the session, Wojtek Swietochowski of ABO Energy, vice chair of SolarPower Europe's lifecycle quality workstream, argued that the European PV market has entered a decisive shift. Where the first phase of deployment was driven almost exclusively by cost reduction, stakeholders are now asking a different question: what value does a solar asset deliver over its entire lifetime? Swietochowski warned that poor quality decisions may look attractive at the outset because they reduce upfront costs, but their consequences tend to surface years later in the form of component failures, complicated warranty claims, reduced yield, delayed fault detection and limited repowering or recycling options. Individually minor, these effects can accumulate into substantial economic losses. "The cheapest solution today can become the most expensive solution tomorrow," was Swietochowski's reminder.
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Conversely, investment in quality has the effect of generating measurable returns across the value chain. High-quality design lowers technical risk, better components improve reliability, sound installation raises system performance and rigorous data management supports informed decisions. Together, these translate into higher yields, lower operating expenses, longer asset life and stronger sustainability outcomes. As such, quality is increasingly a financial asset that is linked directly to bankability, insurance conditions and investor confidence.
Mapping decisions across the value chain
That argument was picked up by David Moser of Becquerel Institute Italia, who presented the decision matrix developed within IEA PVPS Task 13, a tool mapping eight stakeholders and eight lifecycle phases across more than 200 activities, drawn from the Task 13 report and SolarPower Europe's best practice guidelines for EPC, operation and maintenance, and technical due diligence.
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The matrix exposes what Moser calls quality gates: moments where one actor's decision determines outcomes for everyone further down the chain. As he noted, many decisions that affect bankability are made long before bankability itself is even discussed. The tool has recently been expanded to let users filter activities for PV, battery storage and hybrid PV-plus-BESS systems, reflecting how closely the two technologies are now converging. Users can export the results as JSON or CSV files, and the project welcomes suggestions from anyone who spots a gap.
Innovations from SUPERNOVA
Next up was Lukas Koester of EUREC, presenting technical developments from the SUPERNOVA project, all built around two guiding questions: what does each lifecycle phase need from the stages before it, and what can it hand on to the ones after? To tackle the shortage of data at module and string level, project partners have developed smart modules that measure voltage, current, temperature and irradiance, alongside string-level sensors for finer spatial resolution. A fault detection and diagnosis tool from Tecnalia then analyses that data, telling shading, clipping and thermal derating apart from genuine module degradation and allowing faults to be spotted earlier and pinned down more precisely.
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Koester also pointed to a multispectral inspection robot, built on work from the RoboEM project, which carries visual, infrared and shortwave infrared cameras for autonomous field inspection without plant shutdowns. It works alongside drone-based inspections and can be fitted with additional sensors, including infrared spectroscopy for identifying polymers ahead of end-of-life decisions.
To bridge the gap between design and operation, SUPERNOVA partners have also developed a standardised JSON file that carries plant design data from engineering platforms such as PVcase straight into monitoring platforms including 3E's Synaptiq and above's Solargate, enabling automatic onboarding, drone flight planning and as-built verification. Alongside it, a federation of platforms built by SIDEA lets existing systems talk to each other through open specifications and APIs, offering single sign-on, terminology translation and standardised data exchange, and cutting down the historical data losses that happen when asset owners switch monitoring providers.
A transformative moment
Closing the session, Thomas Garabetian of SolarPower Europe described the current period as a transformative moment for how quality is approached in PV. Decisions made today will shape the reliability and bankability of assets for decades to come, making the implementation of best practices across the value chain more important than ever. (hcn)
