Assessment of the building-integrated photovoltaic potential in urban renewal processes in the Swiss context: complementarity of urban- and architectural-scale analyses

Abstract

This paper presents two different approaches to deal with the assessment of the BIPV potential in building renovation projects in urban areas, taking Neuchâtel as a representative middle-size city of the Swiss plateau. 1) A building-scale analysis aiming to show to stakeholders involved in the renovation process that it is important to consider BIPV strategies to achieve the 2050 targets and that it is possible to produce quality architecture using BIPV products already available. For this, five real case studies of residential building archetypes are used. 2) An urban-scale analysis aiming at identifying the priorities of the interventions by comparing the potential of buildings from a large building stock. In each approach, we estimate the total on-site electricity production and the financial incomes provided by the BIPV installation taking into account the electricity self-consumed on-site and the injection of the overproduction into the grid, considering the building energy production and demand at an hourly resolution. Comparing the two approaches allowed us to show that the ranking of the buildings using the two methods remained consistent, despite the – expected – discrepancies in absolute results, and to discuss their complementarity in different stages of the planning and design process.