“Are you ready for artificial intelligence?” With this question, David Moser, head of the Becquerel Institute Italy, opened the recent Solar Quality Summit in Barcelona.
The two-day conference, attended by 250 representatives from project development, operations, financing, and monitoring, focused on AI more intensively than ever before. Organized by SolarPower Europe and Intersolar Europe, the event made AI the central theme of almost every session, highlighting its role in faster business model evaluation, accelerated planning, improved forecasts, and more meticulous construction quality verification.
At the start, organizers showed a video of participants describing how they already integrate AI into daily work. The examples focused on productivity tools, analogous to the shift from letters to email. Users can work faster and make decisions from a broader data foundation, while those who ignore AI risk falling behind. A key challenge: software solutions developed at great expense to differentiate companies could be replicated quickly by competitors using AI at a fraction of the cost, making some risk-taking potentially wasted investment.
The most repeated phrase at the summit was “Garbage in, garbage out.” As decisions become more data-driven, poor data quality can quickly become costly. AI not only makes mistakes – which all participants acknowledged – but can reproduce them quickly and at scale. “You can’t leave your brain at the door,” one participant noted. The takeaway: AI results must be validated; without human accountability, AI does not eliminate risk.
In a panel on AI in quality management and operations, participants discussed its application in photovoltaic projects. The audience associated AI with automation, prediction, and data analysis, but benefits depend on structured, high-quality data.
Sensors alone are not enough; responsibility is equally critical. An audience poll illustrated this: five days before handover of a ground-mounted PV system, a defect is discovered that may cause problems in three to five years. Should construction be stopped, formally reported, ignored, or informally passed to O&M? Most participants considered stopping construction unlikely. One panelist wryly noted he had never seen such a scenario handled that way. Passing responsibility formally to operations management seemed more plausible. Time and budget pressures, along with fragmented responsibilities, often allow defects to slip through.
AI could help reduce these issues. Systematic recording of construction and quality data – including location, evidence, severity, and status – makes unnoticed problems harder to ignore. Drone images compared against digital twins can reveal deviations early. Yet reality remains challenging: checklists are often filled with desired values rather than actual measurements to save time, multimeter readings are sent via WhatsApp instead of properly documented, and daily reports are compiled weekly, resulting in lost detail. Humans, not just AI, make mistakes.
Most participants agreed AI has potential to create industry value, though measuring it is not straightforward. In the discussed applications, AI prevents losses rather than generating revenue, making prevented errors hard to quantify. It can reduce rework, increase standardization, and shift corrections to the planning phase, where costs are lower. One panelist described AI as a tool to detect lapses in discipline early, helping avoid long-term costs rather than guaranteeing quality.
Cybersecurity concerns
Cybersecurity was the summit’s second major topic. Recent incidents, such as the suspected Russian hack of power facilities in Poland, shaped the discussion. As photovoltaic systems become more interconnected—spanning inverters, SCADA, park controllers, and cloud monitoring – the attack surface grows. New European regulations – NIS2, the Cybersecurity Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, and the Network Code on Cybersecurity – require compliance, yet are highly technical and inconsistent across countries. Deep cybersecurity expertise remains scarce.
Two points were emphasized: cybersecurity is ongoing, not a one-off checklist. Patching, updates, monitoring, and incident response are continuous tasks. Geopolitics adds risk: networks involve manufacturers, software, and cloud infrastructure with varying vulnerabilities. Simply avoiding hardware from a certain manufacturer or country does not guarantee safety; in the Poland incident, hackers accessed European and Japanese controllers with weak passwords and missing updates. Still, excessive strategic dependencies should be avoided, and early integration of cybersecurity checks is essential.
The Solar Quality Summit showed that the industry is entering a new phase. AI can accelerate processes, prioritize risks, and detect errors earlier—but it also magnifies weaknesses if data, documentation, and accountability are not clearly defined. As the summit’s unofficial motto put it: “Garbage in, garbage out.”
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