Evaluation of the Implementation of a BIPV Glass in Office Buildings in Spain

The evaluation of the impact of a transparent BIPV glass on an office building energy demands is presented for two climatic areas in Spain. The BIPV glass evaluated is a currently in development innovative technology consisting of a tandem structure of a photovoltaic active ultra-violet filter and organic infra-red photovoltaic cell. The evaluation is carried out with dynamic building simulation, using the experimental optical and electrical properties of the BIPV glass with new transparent BIPV model features. Conventional, acting as reference, and BIPV windows configurations are defined to fulfil the Spanish building code requirements. Then, the heating, cooling, and lighting energy demand, as well as the PV output are calculated, estimating the overall energy balance of the building. In terms of individual end uses, the consumption increases for heating and lighting, while decreasing for cooling. As a result, the total final energy increases in the heating dominated case and decreases in the cooling dominated. However, once accounting the PV generation the results show that the transparent BIPV glass presents an improvement of the overall energy balance by 47.2% and 17.2%, for warm and cold climatic regions in Spain, respectively.