The Global Solar Council joined the ISES Solar World Congress to shed light on PV’s remarkable resilience and growth potential

The International Solar Energy Society (ISES) Solar World Congress (SWC) 2021 is taking place from 25 to 29 October, for the first time online, with the International Energy Agency’s Solar Heating and Cooling Programme as a Key Partner of the Congress. SWC 2021 connects the scientific and research community with renewable energy decision makers, developers, financers, and practitioners to highlight key technology advances that are taking place in the broad field of solar and renewable energy.

Máté Heisz, Chair-elect of the Global Solar Council (GSC) and Head of International Cooperation at SolarPower Europe, has joined the Industry Roundtable #2: How Industry Associations Are Influencing and Accelerating the Transformation on Friday, 29 October 2021. Focus of his intervention was the resilience solar PV has shown during the pandemic despite the disruptive effects on day-to-day operations and supply chains, emerging at the end as one of the few bright spots in the global economy.

Mr Heisz highlighted what are the most crucial actions that policy makers need to endorse in order to accelerate solar growth, as emerged from the several initiatives of the Global Solar Council, first and foremost the Solar Industry Survey issued earlier this year. The engagement initiative, addressed to the Council’s members – comprised of national and regional solar associations – as well as solar business leaders around the world,  was aimed at producing a snapshot of the sector’s current health and gathering insights into possible post-pandemic scenarios for the solar market, to ultimately understand the opportunities and barriers to solar development at this very important stage for the energy transition. The global survey showed an improving outlook for solar business as industry’s expansion accelerated even during the COVID-19 pandemic, sustained by historically-low costs and a gradually improving policy support, even though there is ample scope to raise it further. The main results of the survey on post-pandemic scenarios for the Solar market have also been featured on the SolarPower Europe’s Global Market Outlook 2021.

The session was joined by other representatives of the Global Solar Council, as well: Alessandra Brioschi, Coordinator of the International Relations Group in the Italia Solare Association and Board member of GSC; and Rodrigo Lopes Sauaia, Co-founder and CEO of the Brazilian Photovoltaic Solar Energy Association (ABSOLAR) and Co-Chair of GSC.

The core of the Congress is its Scientific Program, which highlights innovations and advances over a broad range of themes covering perspectives on achieving 100% Renewables, solar electric and solar thermal technologies, storage technologies and grid integration issues, power-to-renewable fuels, building architecture and urban design, and energy meteorology. Each day the Congress has also featured a variety of plenary speeches and parallel theme-related keynote addresses.

“Our energy system is already experiencing a major transformation towards a carbon-free future thanks to strong public demand and to the efforts of national and regional governments, but further urgent action to decarbonize our energy system is essential, and SWC 2021 will address the key challenges to achieve rapidly a total transformation to 100% renewables”, said Dr. David Renné, SWC 2021 Congress Chair and Board member of the GSC.