Twelve partners from eight European countries have launched SUNRISE, a €7.27 million Horizon Europe Innovation Action building the first comprehensive European manufacturing platform for glass-free, recyclable and highly customisable photovoltaic products made of fibre-reinforced composites.
The SUNRISE project (Sustainable Composites Manufacturing Framework for the Mass Customization of Integrated Solar Photovoltaic Products) was officially launched at its kick-off meeting on 25 and 26 June 2026, hosted by the coordinator AIMEN Technology Centre in O Porriño (Pontevedra), Spain. Over the next 36 months, the consortium will develop and demonstrate at industrial scale new manufacturing routes that embed solar cells directly into fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite structures — making it possible to produce photovoltaic products that are lightweight, mechanically robust, freely shaped, visually appealing and designed from the outset to be disassembled and recycled.
Why Europe needs a new way to manufacture solar products
Today’s photovoltaic industry is built around a single dominant product: the flat, glass-protected module sealed with thermoset encapsulants. That design has driven costs down remarkably, but it also sets hard limits — such modules are rigid and heavy, offer little design freedom, are difficult to integrate into the curved and complex surfaces of vehicles, buildings and infrastructure, and their permanent bonding makes disassembly, repair and recycling costly.
Meanwhile the European Union has set ambitious targets to rebuild its solar manufacturing capacity under the Net-Zero Industry Act and the Green Deal Industrial Plan, while fast-growing integrated photovoltaic products (PV) — vehicle-integrated (VIPV), non-flat building-integrated (BIPV), infrastructure-integrated (IIPV) and mobile solar applications — demand exactly the properties conventional modules cannot deliver.
Three integrated pillars, one manufacturing platform
SUNRISE will build a comprehensive FRP manufacturing platform for recyclable, glass-free and highly customisable photovoltaic products. SUNRISE combines advanced composite processing, flexible automation and process monitoring for industrial scalability; new cell shaping and wiring strategies, encapsulants and multifunctional surfaces for materials compatibility and product lifetime; and digital tools, sustainability strategies and standardisation work to align with EU policy. Its core developments include:
- flexible laser cutting with advanced beam shaping, delivering customised cell geometries with smooth edges at industrial productivity;
- sustainable, reversible wiring, including a tape-based stringing prototype with higher wire density and FRP-compatible materials;
- multifunctional surfaces from laser texturing and roll-to-roll replication, for higher light uptake, lower operating temperature and greater robustness;
- one-shot lamination and liquid composite moulding for flat, curved and complex-shape parts, with digital twins, simulation and in-line sensing for automated control;
- recyclable encapsulation and design-for-disassembly, replacing permanent bonding with reversible solutions to enable repair, reuse and material recovery.
These innovations sit within a unified digital environment for virtual prototyping — a Decision Support System, process digital twins and a Digital Product Passport for composite PV structures — plus life-cycle cost and environmental assessment, circularity strategies and a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) upscaling and standardisation roadmap.
Validated on three industrial use cases
The manufacturing routes will be proven on full-scale products at TRL 7, through three complementary demonstrators:
- curved FRP modules for vehicle-integrated PV, targeting at least 80% weight reduction, a 30% cut in balance-of-system costs and lamination cycle times more than halved;
- flat FRP modules for PV noise barriers, cutting weight by at least 30% while reaching 98% of TOPCon reference efficiency and withstanding a 5 400 Pa static load;
- complex-shape FRP-PV structures for maritime applications, integrating PV flush into a boat deck with zero gap and an equivalent antiskid finish, for over 20% cost reduction.
All three will be certified for durability against the IEC 61215 and IEC 61730 standards.
A consortium spanning the full value chain
SUNRISE brings together 12 partners from 8 European countries — 6 research organisations and universities, 5 industrial SMEs and 1 service provider — covering the entire technology-push value chain, from materials and equipment suppliers to composite part manufacturers, PV module producers and integrated PV end users:
- AIMEN Technology Centre (Spain — coordinator)
- ISC Konstanz – International Solar Energy Research Center (Germany)
- Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Germany)
- Solbian Energie Alternative (Italy)
- SoliTek R&D (Lithuania)
- Forster System-Montage-Technik (SMT) (Germany)
- Sticky Solar Power (Sweden)
- Cooling Photonics (Spain)
- CORE Innovation Centre (Greece)
- Instituto Tecnológico de Aragón (Spain)
- University of Freiburg (Germany)
- Becquerel Institute / ICARES Consulting (Belgium & France)
An Independent Advisory Board of industrial players from across the composites and PV value chains will ensure that the project’s technical choices match real market requirements.