On the 11th of October 2022 the Commission formally endorsed a new Solar Photovoltaic Industry Alliance, with the aim of scaling up manufacturing technologies of innovative solar photovoltaic products and components in the EU. This will contribute to accelerating the deployment of solar power across the EU and improving the resilience of the EU's energy system. The Alliance is one of the concrete initiatives of the EU Solar Strategy, adopted in May 2022 as part of the REPowerEU Action Plan, which will help the EU reach over 320 GW of newly installed solar photovoltaic capacity by 2025, and almost 600 GW by 2030. DG GROW C2 is working together with Dutch Pianoo to establish an EU level buying group on sustainable Solar PV so that this important work can be connected to the work of the Solar Alliance.

Commissioner Thierry Breton, responsible for the Single Market said:

To meet Europe's renewable energy objectives — and avoid replacing a dependency on Russian fossil fuels with new dependencies — we are launching an industrial alliance for solar energy. With the alliance's support, the EU could reach 30 Gigawatt of annual solar energy manufacturing capacity by 2025 across the full PV value chain. The alliance will foster an innovative and value-creating industry in Europe, which leads to job creation here. Europe's solar industry already created more than 357,000 jobs. We have the potential to double these figures by the end of the decade.

Once set up, the Alliance will bring together industrial actors, research institutes, consumer associations, NGOs and other stakeholders with an interest in the solar PV sector. It will deliver an action plan for the solar industrial value chain in Europe and engage with the EU and Member States on issues ranging from research and innovation, technology, industrial supply chain, raw materials, access to finance, off-takers, international partnerships and global supply chain resilience, circularity, sustainability and skills. The launch of the Solar Photovoltaic Industry Alliance is expected by the end of the year.

Using the national experiences of the Dutch Buyer Group, DG GROW C2 is collaborating with the competence centre Pianoo and RVO to form a buyer group on sustainable Solar PV on EU-level. The aim is to launch a community of practice around this topic around the first quarter of 2023 which will be open to other EU buyers to participate in. The roadmap for the community of practice is currently being developed. The idea for development of the community of practice is to gather (market) information and make an inventory of PV modules for buyers to compare. Another working idea is to suggests ways to buyers to weigh sustainability aspects versus price and performance, helping buyer to write tenders that include sustainability aspects.