The energy demand in the world is expected to exceed 740 million TJ by 2040 and our dependence on fossil fuels needs to be switched to sustainable and renewable energy sources like solar energy. Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) is one of the best approaches to extracting solar energy. There are more than 200 BIPV products in the market currently but when it comes to integrating these products into the technical aspects such as buildings’ structural integrity, thermal, daylight retainment and aesthetic prospects to be considered. The share of BIPV integration potential of different building types in the world of residential, agricultural, industrial, commercial and other buildings account for 66%, 4.8%, 8.1%, 19.9%, and 1.2% accordingly. Many solar technologies developed to achieve architectural requirements, but the main problem is the trade-off between efficiency and aesthetic appeal, which is less than 10% in coloured and transparent solar modules. This paper discusses the different applications of solar photovoltaics (PV) in building architecture, technical requirements, and different module technologies. The article provides a comprehensive guide for researchers and designers working on the development of BIPV integrations.

In this study, we fabricated light-weight solar module for various applications such as building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), vehicles, trains, etc. Ethylene tetra fluoro ethylene (ETFE) film was applied as a material to replace the cover glass, which occupies more than 65% of the weight of the PV module. Glass fiber reinforced plastic (GRP) was applied to the ones with a low durability by replacing the cover glass to ETFE. Moreover, to achieve a high solar power conversion in this study, we applied a shingled design to weight reduced solar modules. The shingled module with GRP shows 183.7 W of solar-to-power conversion, and the output reduction rate after weight load test was 1.14%.