One of the important promises of FME SUSOLTECH even before it formally started was to establish a new arena for knowledge sharing and interaction between research and industry partners, the so-called Solar Industry Forum. These meetings would provide opportunities for networking, for drawing upon diverse experiences and lessons and provide important input to research activities. An important motivation behind the establishment of the Solar Industry Forum was the desire to establish an arena for generating new spin-off activities, in particular innovation projects and other R&D projects with industry lead and/or participation. The Forum should facilitate a collective reflection and discussion to further strengthen solar cell related activities in Norway, both in research and industry.

June 19^th 2018 participants from many of the Centre’s partners met at IFE, Kjeller to discuss life cycle assessment (LCA) and sustainability of silicon-based PV technology within SuSolTech. Several topics were discussed:

• What is the scope of LCA and sustainability within SuSolTech?
• How can we best communicate the sustainability benefits of Norwegian PV technology?
• What concretely are these benefits and how do they compare with the industry as a whole?

A major goal within SuSolTech is to demonstrate the “greenest” industrial production of silicon and the “greenest” PV installation. We want to make products and build systems that use as little resources as possible and from the resources used, pollute and influence the environment as little as possible.

Unni Ingvild Musdalslien from Equinor talked about Equinor´s focus on sustainability and how this applies to PV plants. Among the factors that were relevant were CO₂ footprint, water management, land use, waste management and end-of-life recycling.

There were good discussions after the presentations, and further plans were made to follow up this important topic and how to reach the targets