While it’s easy to love what Solar photovoltaic roofs offer us in terms of clean and natural energy from the sun, it’s also easy to see that most solar panels are just not a very attractive architectural characteristic once those huge panels are mounted on the roof of your architecturally-authentic historic home.
Definitely not the way to keep a historic home looking historic.
There are, however, some options coming along that can help historic home owners go solar and yet keep the design integrity of their homes. Two large photovoltaic technology providers, Uni-Solar and Dow Solar, have developed roofing shingles with embedded photovoltaic panels that can be nailed into a roof alongside regular asphalt shingles to create a roof that looks much more standard than one with large panel structures on top yet generates power to run the home.
Uni-Solar’s PowerShingle
and
Dow Solar’s PowerHouse
both offer what’s known as Building-Integrated PhotoVoltaic (BIPV) power to homes. Granted that the Dow photo may have been poorly chosen since that house uses brown roofing shingles to go with the black PV shingles, but Uni-Solar seemed to have better understood the key benefit of their product…
Check out this installation with the Dow Powerhouse shingles on SmartPlanet.
3 comments
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December 14, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Rose Yen
How clever! How does the energy production compare with traditional looking panels?
December 14, 2010 at 10:15 pm
mrfrancophile
Well, the solar shingles use what’s known as Thin Film technology for the photovoltaic panels and while it’s getting more efficient over time, it’s still not as efficient as the best panels. Uni-Solar claims that their PowerShingle technology is more efficient, but their product is still not on the market, so we’ll have to see once it actually comes out.
Right now, most thin-film PV panels top out at about 15% efficiency – relatively comparable to the less-expensive crystalline PV panels, but quite a bit lower than the 21% that the most efficient panels, like those from SunPower, are generating. On the other hand, you can probably use more of your roof for panels using the BIPV shingles, so the difference in efficiency may not really matter.
December 18, 2010 at 10:14 pm
ECD Fan
mrfrancophile: You have been misinformed – no thin-film module on the market is 15% efficient. The modules of the world leader in thin-film, First Solar (which accounts for about 80% of the thin-film PV market), are just 11.1% efficient, and the rest of the thin-film modules are mostly 6%-9% efficient (the most efficient thin-film module today is less than 13% efficient, but it is too costly to make). Regular PV modules, which are crystalline, are 13%-14% efficient, while the most-efficient commercial module is SunPower’s crystalline module E19/318, which is 19.5% efficient.
Unisolar does not and cannot make the claim that their PowerShingle is “more efficient.” Unisolar’s most-efficient module is only 6.7% efficient, and the PowerShingle, if it ever gets commercialized, will be significantly less efficient. The previous incarnation of the PowerShingle, sold since 1998, losts its UL certification and became illegal to sell in the United States. Unisolar’s products regularly underperform and suffer from severe long-term degradation, which has partly contributed to Unisolar’s steady loss of market share over the years (Unisolar’s share in the California PV market has dropped to less than 0.2% recently, per CSI data)