February 15-20, the Solar Winter School 2026 took place at the Pierre Laffitte Campus in Sophia Antipolis, France. Organized by the SciDoSol Sponsorship Chair of the Centre O.I.E. at Mines Paris – PSL, the event gathered 32 international participants working or studying in the field of solar radiation and energy. Three members of the Energy&IT Group attended.
The program consisted of lectures as well as hands-on sessions and poster presentations. The lectures covered basic solar radiation measurement methods, ground based or via different types of satellites, weather and solar forecasting models as well as a view on sustainability and life-cycle management. Hands-on sessions offered the opportunity to work with real datasets, explore forecasting options and collect practical insight to the monitoring station and instrumentation.
As part of the activities, two posters from the ENERGY&IT Group were presented. Valentin Bauer presented a poster with the summary of his Masters Thesis which he wrote in cooperation with Mines Paris. There he designed and created a low-cost sky imager camera, based on a fisheye camera and a raspberry pi and open‑source software to estimate pixel-wise diffuse sky radiances in three spectral bands (red, green, blue). Fiona Layes presented a poster about the project Sunny4Urban, working with methods for assessing solar potential in urban environments and improving PV placement recommendations.
For the Energy&IT Group, the winter school offered useful input for several ongoing research activities. Improved understanding of forecasting methods supports work on integrating more accurate solar predictions into energy system simulations. In addition, the material on urban irradiation modelling and radiation data is valuable for projects focused on PV site selection and analysis, such as Sunny4Urban.
Overall, the Solar Winter School 2026 provided opportunities to exchange with researchers from different institutions and was a helpful opportunity to strengthen technical knowledge and connect it to current project work within the group.