The most recent initiative in our Lifecycle Quality Workstream to raise the standards of the solar industry is the development of the EPC Best Practice Guidelines, to be launched in November 2020. This will be done building on the vast knowledge accumulated in the past years during the development of the O&M Best Practice Guidelines and the Asset Management Best Practice Guidelines, creating a dialogue among the different lifecycle phases.

The workstream was initially created in 2015, in order to address the discrepancies between the quality of services provided by different O&M contractors. SolarPower Europe therefore developed the O&M Best Practices Guidelines to contribute to the improvement of the quality and standardisation of solar O&M. Version 4.0 of the O&M Best Practice Guidelines was launched in December 2019.

Asset management was included in the scope of the workstream in 2019, in light of the rapid professionalisation of solar investors and the globalization of solar investment portfolios, which puts increasing requirements on asset managers. As opposed to O&M service providers, asset managers deal with the commercial and financial management of a solar investment. To address the issue of quality in solar asset management, SolarPower Europe launched the first version of the Solar Asset Management Best Practices Guidelines, in December 2019.