Solar Facade System: All-in-One Home Heating and Lighting Product
What if you could combine solar photovoltaics (PV), solar thermal energy, passive solar heat, and daylighting into one architecturally sound and appealing product? Researchers at the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE) are working on that very product right now. Their Integrated Concentrating (IC) Solar Facade System embodies all the main uses for solar power while, says CASE, increasing efficiency and shortening payback periods.
CASE’s IC Solar System begins with concentrating PV. What a homeowner will see integrated into the exterior of their home are transparent, hexagonal lenses that focus solar irradiation onto tiny solar cells within the facade. Those lenses concentrate sunlight up to 400 times, producing a much more efficient, multi-junction solar cell – up to 39.4 percent under manufactured conditions.
The system allows you to see outdoors while the sun provides natural, energy-saving indoor light during the day. But that’s not all. In the small places between the honeycombed solar panels travels a coolant that captures whatever solar energy is not converted by the PV cell. 
That heat can be used to heat the water supply or, if effective enough, heat the living space. It also reduces solar heat gain and improves the quality of indoor lighting. To read a press release on the Solar Facade System, see the CASE website.
There are still some unanswered questions regarding the facade. For instance, how easily can it be manufactured? Can it be commercialized in an affordable way? How truly aesthetically pleasing is it? One can’t help but be impressed by the many solar functions served by just one product, capturing both solar thermal and PV power. But, like any solar product, it must be proven in the real world.
Partnering with CASE in this solar hybrid endeavor is the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and architectural firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP, otherwise known simply as SOM.
Posted on February 18th in Solar Products by Dan.