INCREASE aims to contribute to a wider uptake of IPV by delivering innovations at module and system level, as well as for the design & operation phase. New encapsulants and coatings will be developed contributing to improved aesthetics, reduced glare, lower environmental footprint, improved behavior during fire, and improved antifoiling and antisoiling behavior. At system level, innovations focus on integrated facade and roof concepts, as well as noise barriers. Practical guidelines will further be delivered for bespoke infrastructure integrated projects, validated with a variety of complementary infrastructure integrated PV projects. Elaborate testing is foreseen at module and system level in line with relevant construction related and electrical standards. Optimal case-specific selection of IPV size and characteristics will be supported by a multi-objective optimisation software that takes into account the shape and use of the building or infrastructure, its surroundings, and its energy flexibility potential and steer the asset operation as well as suggest specific user behaviour to maximise the self-consumption. To increase market acceptance, a strong layer of user feedback and co-creation underpins the overall R&D activities, and contributes to delivering 10 complementary building and infrastructure demonstrations on 9 locations in 6 European countries. Cross-sector interactions, policy exchanges, investor dialogues, and country-specific business case assessments will further direct the exploitation towards large scale market uptake.

SHINE PV will develop alternative technological routes to PV production for Silicon Heterojunction and TOPCon solar cells, covering the three key steps in the back-end manufacturing: metallization, post-processing and interconnection. SHINE PV will demonstrate different flows and down-select the most promising ones in terms of cost of ownership and high volume manufacturing readiness. Advanced equipment at TRL7 with Industry 4.0 dedicated features, innovative materials and solutions will be developed. For the metallization, SHINE PV will introduce parallel dispensing and plating as High Volume Manufacturing (HVM) alternative processes to incumbent screen printing, with the objective of demonstrating the complete or partial replacement of Ag with Cu, a fundamental step to enable Tera-Watt scale production levels. Moreover, SHINE PV will increase the efficiency through cell post-processing by applying Light Soaking process in HVM and recover the cutting-induced losses by Edge Re-Passivation. For the module making step, the innovations in interconnection proposed are Twill and Shingling processes and HVM equipment. Both will leverage on the optimization of the metallization and post-processing steps and will demonstrate their potential in terms of superior electrical properties, aesthetics, reliability, and compatibility with premium module designs. The expectation of the project is to enable an increase of solar cell (or module) efficiency of 0.5% absolute versus the reference process with a simultaneous CoO reduction of 20%, due to reduced material costs and increased equipment productivity. SHINE PV project will demonstrate the integrated innovative processes and novel equipment both virtually and within physical pilots at industrial partners at TRL7. To our knowledge for all these technologies no production equipment is available for HVM worldwide, and we envision a great potential for a PV supply chain revamping in EU.