Influence of future climate scenarios on the sizing of Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) installations. Case study of a new research-center building in Switzerland

This paper analyzes the findings obtained when applying a multi-criteria performance-based method for sizing a BIPV installation considering different weather files, representing historical data (TMY; typical meteorological year) and prospective data (three alternative future climate change (CC) scenarios; RCP2.6, 4.5 and 8.5) with time horizons from 2030 to 2100. Through a solar and energy simulation process over a case-study building, electricity consumption and production values are computed along with various performance parameters such as self-sufficiency and carbon content of the electricity produced, for each simulated weather scenario. Results show that characteristics (i.e., size, etc.) of the BIPV installation that represents the best trade-off solution are slightly different according to the weather file considered. Given the warming climate, the global performance of a given BIPV installation can be expected to increase over time.