Design and assessment of building integrated PV (BIPV) system towards net zero energy building for tropical climate

Abstract

Recent increment trend of renewable energy generation demand has revolutionised on how modern civilisation harnessing energy from renewable source especially the solar energy. According to IRENA, about 53% increase of solar energy installed capacity had been reported from year 2017 to 2021. This trend is expected to be doubles as revised Energy Efficient Directive (EU) is committed to add renewable share from 17% from 2015 to 34% in 2030. Among the effort to achieve the target highlighted by International Energy Agency (IEA) in their Net Zero by 2050 Roadmap is to develop or improved energy management on existing and new building to meet net zero energy building. One of the emerging and fast-growing solution is implementing Building Integration Photovoltaic (BIPV) as it offered not only clean electricity generation but also seamless integration aspect to the building envelope. However, due to a limitation factor such as insufficient BIPV infrastructure which dominantly base in European countries. This scenario limits the technology progress especially in Asian countries. Although attractive benefit shown by BIPV system, it is still having a crucial limitation on the visual and aesthetic appearance which considered as “unattractive” to the building appearance by viewers. Thus, there will be quite an issue to implement BIPV on architectural sensitive building such as historic and iconic building. In order to solve this issue, a pilot study of coloured BIPV system performance is conducted on an iconic building in tropical climate region which is Daya Bumi Building, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The method adopted is based on cross-platform between 3D modelling simulation in Building Information Modelling (BIM) software and detail solar analysis (PVsyst) to obtain accurate analysis results. Varies of coloured PV modules are assess and compared to obtain the optimum BIPV system configuration. The proposed BIPV system is able to produce energy of 679.72 MW annually with carbon saving of 10367.66 tCO2/year of CO2 emission. The coloured BIPV application are expected to camouflage the PV panel appearance on the building which could preserve the original architectural aesthetic. This research promotes conscious of BIPV as a crucial innovative solution in implementing PV panel on building without sacrificing the architectural aesthetic value. Furthermore, BIPV system design using BIM software can be replicate to provide seamless work transition between building architecture, structural engineering, renewable energy engineering and building operations. This is in line with Malaysian 10-10MySTIE Framework effort to transform into a knowledge-intensive and innovation driven economy which include production, management and distribution of energy from renewable energy sources.