Mapping Decisions Along the Value Chain: Who Gives a Watt?

Recording of Wednesday, May 07, 2025 | The smarter E Europe Conferences 2025 | Conference Program | Language: English | Duration: 16:32 .

IEA's PVPS Program Unveils Report and Tool to Address Extreme Weather Impacts on Solar Projects at Summit

The session on Extreme Weather Events and Impact on Performance and Reliability, led by Ulrike Jahn from the Fraunhofer Institute CSP in Germany, is part of an international collaboration under the International Energy Agency's PVPS program. It involves over 300 experts from more than 35 countries working to improve photovoltaic (PV) system reliability amidst extreme weather conditions. The presentation addresses how such events impact plans, identifies risks, quantifies them, and proposes strategies for resilient systems like hail-resistant PV setups. It emphasizes understanding technical failure mechanisms while providing insights into a decision matrix developed for managing these challenges across different value chain phases—highlighting economic impacts through KPIs analysis. Digitalization plays a crucial role in optimizing project management processes within this context. Reports produced by this network are available online via QR codes or flyers distributed during sessions covering topics beyond today's focus area—including floating PVs or agrivoltaics applications—and accessible post-session as well. Additionally discussed is a comprehensive approach to managing photovoltaic projects with stakeholder interactions across various development phases using spreadsheet-based methods ensuring grid connection viability and regulatory compliance while addressing site constraints. Decision matrices were created at the Solar Quality Summit to identify gaps; feedback was gathered accordingly with reports expected in June detailing key performance indicators among other parameters related to utility-scale plants' financial modeling insights aimed at enhancing solar energy project decision-making processes collaboratively tested alongside TASC 13.3 experts led by David Moser.

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Speaker

Ulrike Jahn
Senior Scientist
Fraunhofer Center for Silicon-Photovoltaics CSP
Germany

Talk of session: Utility-Scale Solar Power III: Impacts of Extreme Weather on PV Power Plants

The increase in frequency and intensity of severe weather events associated with global climate change poses a growing risk to PV systems worldwide. These local and global risks range from outright destruction of power plants to long-term performance losses due to accelerated component and system degradation. Without concerted and event-specific resilience strategies, severe weather increasingly threatens the robustness and availability of PV generation worldwide. This session will: Raise awareness of climate change and its implications for a solar-intensive energy economy Present a range of extreme-weather events that can impact PV power plants and identify/quantify the risks Share strategies for designing and siting storm-resilient PV systems Provide information on failure mechanisms and their root causes.

Further Talks of this session: