This year I attended the second edition of the IPV Conference in Florence.
The tone of the conference was quite different from last year’s first edition, confirming that it is still a young event, searching for the right balance between institutions, universities, industry and the final market.
While in 2024 the IPV Conference was a rather timid initiative where many exhibitors mainly shared their experience and promoted their products, the 2025 edition turned into two content packed days, with numerous technology focused presentations and case studies covering several areas of integrated photovoltaics:
- BIPV applications on buildings
- Integration of photovoltaics in vehicles
- Agrivoltaics in rural contexts
Although the presentations were very interesting, as were the experiences and projects showcased, the challenge for the next editions will be to bring the “demand side” of the value chain much closer to the event for example Real Estate players (property developers and architecture firms) interested in BIPV so they can see and touch the latest technological developments and better assess how to integrate them into their projects.
For years we’ve heard that BIPV struggles to scale to wider application but this is more an issue of organization and project planning than of available technology: many new buildings are still designed without considering PV integration on surfaces, and the regulatory framework remains fragmented with very different rules and constraints.
An event like this Conference could be extremely useful in creating a concrete bridge between industry and policy-makers: on one hand, providing institutions with more targeted input from the market and on the other hand, giving industry clearer feedback on the directions to take.
In other words, we need a more coordinated and less fragmented approach to the evolution of technological trends that brings together, at the same table, those who develop solutions, those who use them and those who shape the regulatory framework.
Another topic that emerged during the Conference (always interesting to listen but difficult to translate into concrete actions and probably a “no sense” to talk to the same industry audience) is the safeguarding of the European PV industry in the face of competition from Chinese manufacturers.
China is still often perceived as a producer of “low-value” or unreliable technology but in reality there is a production capacity and a level of product development there that is among the highest in the world also thanks to a fully developed supply chain.
This is exactly where politics should step in, with a forward-looking approach rather than trying “to close the gate when the cows have already escaped”, and instead look for smart solutions in terms of industrial cooperation, specialization and re-launch.
So I found particularly meaningful the presentation by a Chinese company invited to the Conference, showing the use of humanoid robots on a production line. I don’t know if this is already implemented in real production but I certainly did not expect that what I had seen and had impressed me just few weeks ago at the CIIF exhibition in Shanghai was already at the stage of industrial adoption.
This once again shows how essential it is to have a political vision for strategic technology choices: some “necessary evils” can be accepted or tolerated if they fit into a long-term vision aimed at a greater goal. China is clearly demonstrating this: in a bunch of years, PV production lines have evolved from manual to fully automated where humanoid robots are used to manufacture non-standard panels.
The solar sector has always been particularly sensitive to these paradigms and I am very aware of this because I experience this global competition in my daily work. Exactly as is already happening in the automotive industry I expect many other sectors to be increasingly influenced by these dynamics and that, more and more often, entrepreneurial vision alone will not be enough to win challenges that now play out on a global scale. We need more action by EU politicians!
Stepping back to the IPV Conference in Florence, I can say it was above all a great opportunity to meet friends and long-standing colleagues from the European PV industry in the beautiful setting of Florence. It will definitely be a pleasure to attend again next year.
Many thanks to the organisers, ETA-Florence Renewable Energies and the Seamless-PV Project, for their commitment to the successful delivery of this event.