PV technology holds the potential to significantly contribute to Europe’s 2020 and 2050 goals for greenhouse gas emissions and renewable energy. The European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) has published “SET for 2020”, which has been developed as a vision and roadmap for ambitious deployment in Europe in the period 2010-2020 and beyond. This report quantifies how the application of PV in Europe may be accelerated if R&D efforts are intensified and a number of other measures are taken. Depending on the scenario, the contributions of PV to the total European electricity production can be 4% to 10% in 2020.

The EERA Joint Programme on Photovoltaic Solar Energy will contribute to these goals and to developments beyond 2020 through Europe-wide programming and aligning of R&D activities in member states.The objective of the Joint Programme is to accelerate the development of Photovoltaic Solar Energy to an energy technology that can be implemented at a very large scale through Joint Programming activities by key research institutes in Europe. The SEI needs developments regarding reduction of electricity generation costs as well as integration into the electricity infrastructure. The EERA Joint Programme focuses primarily on cost reduction of PV systems, through enhancement of performance, development of low-cost, high-throughput manufacturing processes, and improvement of lifetime and reliability of PV systems and components.

Structure

• SP1 Silicon Technology – Erik Marstein (IFE), Erik.Stensrud.Marstein@ife.no
• SP2 Thin-film inorganic photovoltaics – Iver Lauermann (HZB), iver.lauermann@helmholtz-berlin.de
• SP3 Hybrid and organic photovoltaics – Suren Gevorgyan (DTU), surg@dtu.dk and Aldo Di Carlo (Tor Vergata University Rome), aldo.dicarlo@uniroma2.it
• SP4 Concentrated photovoltaics (CPV) – Ignacio Anton (UPM), nacho@ies-def.upm.es and Andrea Pucci (University of Pisa), andrea.pucci@unipi.it
• SP5 PV systems – Abermann Stephan (AIT), Stephan.Abermann@ait.ac.at
• SP6 PV durability and reliability – Ralph Gottschalg (Fraunhofer), Ralph.Gottschalg@csp.fraunhofer.de
• SP7 Research infrastructures, mobility and training – Ivan Gordon (imec), gordoni@imec.be