Status, barriers and perspectives of building integrated photovoltaic systems

Abstract

Many countries apply measures for the limitation of the conventional energy technologies and try to expand the use of renewables. As the building sector accounts for almost 40% of the energy consumption in Europe, building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) systems gain peoples’ interest lately concerning the replacement of the conventional construction materials of the buildings envelope with photovoltaic (PV) panels which can serve at the same time as construction material and energy producer. The aim of this study is to present an overview of the available published research on the BIPV systems and identify the barriers and risks associated with the application of BIPV and discuss the future perspectives and solutions through recommendations for future research and development. The most important barriers of the BIPV systems are the feed in tariff implementation, the public acceptance, the governmental economic support in terms of subsidies and technical aspects like the power losses and the architectural considerations. The future perspectives of the BIPV systems proposed are based on the barriers discussed. It is stated that new solutions in the PV industry are many and various and there is room for improvement regarding design, configuration, ventilation, positioning, guidelines, monitoring and performance prediction. In total, more than 100 articles have been identified and analysed since 2000. Many of these articles have a predominant focus on the investigation of the performance of the system, and the ventilation of the PV panels in BIPV applications for electricity production, due to the negative role of the temperature on PVs electrical efficiency, and the heat transfer behavior of the system. This paper shows that although research in the adoption of BIPV systems in terms of their performance and optimization is fairly new, it has gained attention in the last decades. However, their practical applications have been slow in comparison with the conventional rack-mounted PV panels.