The overall objective of this proposal is to reduce the risk associated with investments in sustainable energy projects. The project results should increase trust from investors, financers and insurance companies. The project aims to establish a common practice for professional risk assessment based on technical and financial due diligence. The focus is on photovoltaic (PV) installations, with emphasis on projects on buildings or at the customer side of the electricity consumption meter and financed by professional investors. The project pursues the following specific objectives: - To develop, document and establish practices for evaluating and mitigating the technical risks associated with investments in photovoltaics - To develop, document and establish practices for valuing such risks when modeling the costs of a PV investment as investors do when evaluating the life cycle costs of such projects - To evaluate how these risks affect the electricity production and the expected return on investment in different business models - To enable the key actors, and particularly the financial market actors, to widely adopt the project results as best practices for the mitigation of risk of sustainable energy investments with current and new business models. The project will be based on large amount of empirical data available within the consortium and from other projects, allowing to formulate recommendations that are statistically significant and based on a large evidence base. The project will involve all relevant stakeholders being financial market actors, valuation and standardization entities, building and PV plant owners, industry, energy prosumers and policy makers. The impacts to be achieved are reduced uncertainty, increased investors’ confidence and trust, valuation methodologies agreed by the market, standardized descriptions of investments, labelling schemes or harmonized frameworks for investment, and support to national strategies for financing.

TRUST-PV will demonstrate increase in performance and reliability of PV components (e.g. module O&M friendly design, inverter enabled O&M solutions, aftermarket coatings, extended testing beyond standard) and PV systems (e.g. more accurate yield models and assessment, data-driven mitigation measures from monitoring and advanced field inspection, reliability of novel system concepts such as floating PV) in large portfolios of distributed and/or utility scale PV. The TRUST-PV results will be tested and demonstrated from fab to field and all data gathered along the value chain will flow into a decision support system platform with enhanced decision-making using AI. The innovation at component level in TRUST-PV will be driven by the needs of stakeholders operating in a later stage of a PV project, i.e. Asset managers, EPC and O&M operators. TRUST-PV PV modules will thus become O&M friendly and inverter will enable rapid and cost-effective field inspection. The innovation at system level will fully exploit the digitalisation of the PV sector by linking 3D design with BIM concepts, developing more accurate models for yield assessments, and closing the gap between performance and failure detection through monitoring and field inspection. The innovation at the point of connection is based on the deployment of tailored strategies for the residential sector (better observability of performance with cost-effective monitoring solution, use of storage to enable renewable energy communities) and the utility sector (e.g. combination of advanced forecasting with storage and regulation through power plant controllers) with the final aim of improving the hosting capacity and increase stability. Finally, in TRUST-PV we envision a path of circular economy which enhances disposed components/material recovery for further use in the industry, to support progressive steps of plant repowering, aimed at increasing their production and lifetime without requiring additional land.