Abstract
Several recent international surveys [1], [2] carried out among BIPV stakeholders reveals that one of the main barriers for the wide-spread of BIPV (building integrated photovoltaic) systems is the high cost. The economic issue is still perceived as a barrier by architects and contractors, who are the main BIPV stakeholders. On the other hand, the drastic cost breakdown of PV in recent years has enormously decreased BIPV prices leading to cost competitiveness with standard building materials. It is thus essential to increase trust of architects, investors and financers stakeholders, showing business cases and real stories. Architects perception is highly influenced by “tangible examples” and real experiences more than by theoretical calculations. This paper shows 15 realized BIPV projects as business case studies, providing information on their final user costs. The case studies were selected among more than 40 examples collected in a local “call for case study”, in order to represent “ordinary BIPV high quality” examples, including several kind of integration typologies representing both private and public sector. Our investigation field is not on “extraordinary, archistar-designed” BIPV projects, but on “ordinary BIPV high quality”, meaning BIPV cases with high quality which have high replication potential overall Europe. The economic matter is tackled from two different perspectives: the “PV” perspective –normalizing the cost to kWp, and the “building” perspective –normalizing the cost to m2. Results show that the cost of the analyzed BIPV systems ranges (i) from 2.500 €/kWp to 8.500 €/kWp, with an average of around 5.400€/kWp and (ii) from 300 €/m2 to 1.400 €/m2, with an average of around 600 €/m2. Looking in particular at the “building” perspective (which might be more interesting for architects), it is shown that the BIPV system capital cost lays in an acceptable range and it is even cheaper than some standard passive building materials [3] (e.g. glazed curtain walls, stone and others). This, without even considering the pay-back time period, which ranges from 4 to 11 years for the presented case studies and which is “infinite” for standard passive solutions. These tangible examples demonstrate that, despite the economic issue is still perceived as a barrier for the wide spread of BIPV systems [1], [2], the use of PV in architecture is instead absolutely viable from this point of view.