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POLE 3 : Dissemination of the Use of Solar Energy

Key focus areas include:Business and Economic Issues

• Economic valuation of solar systems: assessing solar value from household to micro-grid and regional scales, considering demand management, backup solutions, and emerging technologies such as blockchain.
• Technology acceptance and behavioural analysis: understanding adoption, usage patterns, and consumer behaviour. The rise of prosumers introduces new complexities in modelling production and consumption.
• Business model innovation: identifying sustainable solar business models, particularly in downstream European markets.
• Optimal investment and consumption strategies: analysing how households and firms invest in solar façades and manage electricity use.
• Policy-driven deployment mechanisms: evaluating instruments such as net metering, feed-in tariffs, and storage subsidies to maximise solar integration.

Legal and Policy Issues

• Conflict-of-use management: addressing legal tensions between energy production and environmental performance.
• From individual to collective systems: developing legal frameworks (contract and liability law) to enable integrated, multi-actor energy systems with shared costs and benefits.
• Public–private coordination: strengthening links between local private initiatives and public policies across scales (local to supranational).
• Role of local authorities: supporting solar development through planning, incentives, experimentation, and public investment.

Solar technologies, as low-emission and increasingly cost-competitive solutions for local energy generation, challenge traditional energy infrastructure business models. However, several barriers limit their large-scale adoption, including intermittency, grid integration challenges, regulatory constraints, environmental considerations, economic viability, technological stability, and user acceptance. Theme 3 focuses on overcoming these societal and economic barriers to accelerate market penetration. Previous research, including Solar Energy Law (2010) and the ANR REVE project (2014–2017), highlighted the importance of regulatory frameworks, smart meters, storage solutions, and profitability dynamics at the household level. Each scientific theme is coordinated by a Scientific Leader responsible for research activities aligned with the programme’s objectives and its international academic and socio-economic partnerships.

POLE 1 : Solar Resources for Multi-Scale Energy Needs in the Built Environment

Key focus areas include:

• Innovative power generation technologies

Emerging photovoltaic materials (organic, polymer, hybrid, perovskite) complement existing silicon technologies. Their lightweight, flexible, and low-cost manufacturing potential enables broader applications, including mobility and deployment in remote or peri-urban areas.

• Integrated clean energy technologies for ZEBs (Zero Energy Buildings)

Research on retrofitting and new construction projects integrating solar thermal and PV systems. Topics include urban integration, performance, durability, and economic models. New building envelope designs, recovery of anthropogenic energy, and the use of ground and underground resources (collection, storage, geothermal) are also explored.

• Solar building design and solar city planning

Optimising building design and urban layout to maximise solar energy collection while maintaining aesthetic and functional requirements, particularly at district scale.

• Bio-inspired approaches to solar buildings and cities

Viewing buildings and cities as living systems, drawing on concepts such as urban metabolism, self-organisation, and forest-like vertical structures combining solar collection and resource access.

Improving the energy efficiency of existing buildings requires not only upgrades to the building envelope but also the integration of energy-harvesting technologies such as BIPV and BIPV/T systems with storage. However, solar energy generation potential remains largely overlooked in current energy and urban planning policies. To fully exploit distributed solar energy in increasingly dense urban environments, several challenges must be addressed. These include limited knowledge of solar resources due to shading, building interactions, reflections, local climate conditions, cloud cover, and pollution-related soiling. Providing policymakers with reliable assessments of solar potential is therefore essential for developing effective building and urban policies. This research theme builds on collaborations with INES, Labex CEMAM, and existing INTERREG French-Swiss projects. It examines renewable energy optimisation from the building scale to districts and entire cities.

POLE 2 : Digitization of Solar Resources for Improved Reliability

Key focus areas include:Data modelling and algorithm development

• Development of mathematical and statistical models for analysing complex energy systems
• Creation of digital platforms for measuring, monitoring, and improving building and urban energy performance
• Digital modelling across BIM (Building), CIM (City), and TIM (Territory) scales, enabling integration of multi-domain data
• Multi-scale, multi-time, and multi-physics modelling to optimise energy production, distribution, flexibility, and security

Information technology and data sciences

• Analysis of past solar energy projects to identify lessons learned
• Big data analytics and deep learning (e.g., satellite imagery) to enhance large-scale solar resource estimation
• Data-driven decision support through advanced aggregation and indicator development
• Performance and reliability improvements via data mining, including fault detection and diagnostics (e.g., HelioCity initiative)

Improving the accuracy of solar potential assessments in the built environment requires interconnected tools capable of handling multi-scale modelling and advanced digital platforms. The deployment of solar energy also depends on smart metering, decision-support systems, and multi-criteria evaluation frameworks. Addressing these challenges demands a broad skill set spanning mathematics, information theory, and digital and data sciences. A comprehensive platform must integrate 2D/3D modelling tools, robust mathematical and scientific computation, high-performance computing, and large-scale data processing, including image analysis and deep learning, to ensure system performance and reliability. This theme leverages the MUST meso-centre computing facility (part of the European Grid Initiative) and connects with the Equipex DURASOL, which provides insights into solar component ageing and failure mechanisms.