The ETIP PV Secretariat proposal (EUPV+) is designed to re-strengthen the European Technology and Innovation Platform for Photovoltaics (ETIP PV) by implementing a strong and pro-active Secretariat which will provide effective support to the ETIP PV Governance structures and the Working Groups. It will also further work to ensure that the ETIP PV becomes the point of reference for all stakeholders, especially PV industry, but also European and Member State officials. The project shall continue integrating national or regional PV platforms, and strengthening the relations with other organizations supporting the same goals, such as EERA, but also national PV associations and all trade bodies aiming at supporting the development of the European PV industry, not forgetting the other ETIPs.

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.

Feed-in tariffs (FITs) have been the fuel for successful solar PV growth stories in basically every one of today’s large solar markets. First in Europe, now in China and Japan. The US is the only exception – backed by tax credits and net-metering, leasing has become a key means of financing residential solar systems there. With many European countries phasing out FITs, the simplicity of selling solar power will be gone; and without safe and fair returns, real estate and homeowners will not invest in PV anymore. In post-FIT times, solar companies and/or electric utilities in partnership with financial institutions will have to come up with new business models and financing schemes for PV investors in order to continue the success story of the FIT era. The German Solar Industry Association as project coordinator is driven by the mission to successfully evolve those business and financing models, to disseminate them among stakeholders and to shape the necessary policy framework and to remove barriers that prevent those models from realization. Consequently, the goal of PV Financing is to help stakeholders from specific application segments with the implementation of PV projects based on new PV business models while applying innovative equity and debt financing schemes. The availability of financing for PV projects based on the new business models shall be increased and the transaction costs shall be decreased by educating investors, commercial banks and insurance companies on the PV business models and their risks.