The Italian contribution to the SET Plan Implementation Plan was a coordinated effort of the whole Italian R&I community stretching from basic research (universities and public research institutions) to industrial research and demonstration (industries). In order to execute and further develop the plan, a national network of R&I stakeholders of the PV sector was established at the beginning of 2019 as a result of a coordinated effort by the Italian representatives in ETIP-PV, EERA PV-JP and PV-IWG (collectively defined as “Temporary Organising Committee”). Among the immediate priorities of the network has been to map the research projects and the research facilities devoted to R&I in the field of PV throughout the country. The main target of this action coincides with the stakeholders of the Italian PV sector who are actively engaged in R&I activities. Both public research institutions and industries are included in the survey. There is a strong agreement among the national stakeholders about the need for this action and its objectives.
The data is processed using Microsoft PowerBI where the original Excel data are processed dynamically to generate two separate reports:
• the first, containing the map of the Italian R&I laboratories with the corresponding table of all the coordinates and addresses of each site
• the second containing the detailed list of the lab facilities (currently more than 380) independently of their location*.
*Each facility is linked to its current PV applications, to the maximum TRL achieved so far and, most of all, to its “unique selling points” (specific expertise of the operators and/or characteristics of the equipment), with respect to standard equipment available on the market. Additional data about key technical characteristics of the equipment, such as the maximum size of the “processed units” (lab samples, wafers, solar cells, modules, inverters, systems, plants, etc) or the maximum throughput and/or overall capacity devoted to PV, are in the database but not directly accessible in this table.
The structure of the database is such that, the connection between each lab facility and the rest of the non-public information, can be easily released to specific stakeholders subject to the consent of the organisation who provided the data.