what if we've been thinking about going solar all wrong when you're going solar you're probably
picturing some guy on your roof installing solar panels which makes sense most of us have hundreds
of square feet of otherwise unused roof space but it got me thinking what if you live in a condo
or high-rise the business case for solar kind of falls apart here's why the average single-family
home in the u.s is roughly 2 300 square feet using the following assumptions and accounting for roof
orientation and shading that means roughly 600 to 1200 feet of usable roof space or between
28 and 56 solar panels good for between 10 and 20 kilo hours of solar generation so that means
the average home can produce roughly 4 kilowatts of solar energy per person living there that's
pretty great but how do things change if you live in a high-rise over the past 30 years something
interesting has happened in the 90s the average apartment building was three stories tall that
rose to four stories in the 2000s and now is six stories tall today the taller a building gets the
ratio of roof area per person makes rooftop solar a non-starter but taller buildings also mean more
surface area on the walls which is exactly what metrex aims to capitalize on with their building
integrated photovoltaic technology so what's the answer then for people who live in high density
areas well turns out i have a huge thank you to metrix for inviting me out here to lovely toronto
ontario canada it's a little cold out but the sun is popping out where here they build what's
called building integrated photovoltaics for example these pillars behind me are actually
solar panels they are part of their building integrated solar panel system
and all of this all the way to the top is actually producing electricity isn't that crazy
what's really interesting about this is it shows you the kinds of architectural choices that you
can have you don't have to have big walls even small cuts and things like this are able to be
achieved by having their custom ability to cut pieces of this paneling to various sizes so as
the sun hits those panels up there it's producing energy and i think you probably get where this is
going and why this could be huge for the future of high density urban areas and renewable energy we
are pretty much vertically integrated so bring we bring raw material and we create finished products
we start from aluminum glass you know basic raw materials that you can get and then we develop
and create all these products most of our current buildings weren't designed with energy efficiency
in mind so things like solar panels have been retrofitted onto existing designs bipv technology
weave solar technology into the very fabric of the buildings themselves serving as both
the outer layer of the structure while generating electricity for either on-site or grid integration
they can be integrated into different building structures like precast aluminum bricks or wood
and the best part is on the outside it looks like any other typical building material what makes
metrics so unique is their proprietary coating technology which makes their panels look like
marble or any other siding material but behind it produce solar energy but what you're looking at
here is basically different colors and patterns that uh you're producing or testing or just
looking at it so you're telling me that is a solar producing panel that is a solar producing panel
you know when we go to events they started to go to events just recently they had to put a
sticker on them so people they don't confuse it with a marble or they don't go back yeah they
don't i think it's for a kitchen countertop if you look really closely you can see the
solar that's amazing this outer layer can be whatever the customer wants
yes how hard is that to i mean the in terms of like the logistics and the complexity of output
how big of a and how do you handle that that's one of our kind of challenges we have to overcome
and right now within two weeks we can come up with a new caller as we receive a request
then we come up with a new color within two weeks but we still have to go through a lot of
try an error r d you know to figure out the best color versus the look
if i have a requirement i want exactly this look you could deliver on that exact look that's right
yeah do you have a like you need a minimum order size to make it look like financially yeah like
minimum number of pieces we are looking at is a thousand piece per order okay if it's less than
that it becomes a mock-up yeah it's not a project yeah different colors have different effects
on the lights obviously you want to stay away from any black pigmentation and use really the the fact
that the cells and the back sheet and everything like that already has a black pigmentation in it
on the other hand anything or anytime you have white color you can put as much as you
want because when you're putting it it still looks good but it still has enough power going through
you would never think that this is a solar module right so let's pull this one a little bit so
um both of these are modules um that have solar cells fully functioning um this has more without
going to the details of how we're making the pattern but this one has more white than that one
because we were trying to match that shade so this one has slightly less power than that one you can
have a priority that is more on the visual side or the production side correct you have that choice
you can say look i wanted to whatever production i get i'll take it but i want it to be purely white
or exactly exactly i want to make more power so you know when i'm doing my tests and like making
sure about the power loss i'm getting i get very excited i'm like we are capable of making
something very aesthetically pleasing and only a small amount of power loss i don't know if you saw
our fins on the outside those are fully active modules that are white that have enough power
yet they are aesthetically pleasing and that's really what i realize in this world if you want to
sell something to the to the mass you want it to be aesthetically pleasing so that it will be
sold and put on those facades that we want but in the same time it has enough power obviously it's
not exactly the same as a module that has no sort of aesthetic coverage on it but it's so close and
yet it's technically pleasing so this is one of the nicer marble looking modules that i personally
like if you know regular modules they have silver ribbons right so we hide that and we optimize the
amount that is hidden so that we don't overhide and then we don't want to cover this up we just
want to cover the string itself right now matrix has three facades on their headquarters that are
out on display the first is the front column fins then there's the west wall and following the top
brick section the west wall is one of my earlier projects that i'm you know happy and excited about
when i see it it's it's very fulfilling when you know there's something that you were working on
for a while and then you're like so in the zone and then all of a sudden you see it out there um
for me it's very exciting to see that never gets old i love that
a 22 square foot 72 cell installation can generate up to 380 watts according to the
company a typical 30-story building using metrex's products can generate enough solar
energy to power 48 homes per year which would be the same thing as taking 61 cars off the road but
the company is more than just cheap talk their first product will be their own headquarters
in toronto where they will be employing a system capable of generating over 600 kilowatts to power
their own production line the main point here is this is a building built in after the world
bar and now you're reclading it making it look new and getting electricity out of it yeah so now you
might be asking how does bipv technology compare with traditional building materials and current
solar technology and like all emerging technology there's always going to be a trade-off so let's
say the traditional one that is 20 to 22 percent ours could be 18 to 20 percent really yeah that's
very very minimal that's a trade-off but we are comparing with something that's zero right so we
compare ourselves with concrete or aluminum which is zero so we still you're eighteen percent twenty
percent ahead yeah i mean the thought of having a layer that gives you the visual that you want
and you're only losing a couple of percent that's i thought it'd be much i thought it'd be lower
than that well it took us a couple of years to get there we used to be much lower that's cool their
line of products cover a surprisingly wide range of use cases unlike your house which probably
has an exterior made out of stucco or siding usually would larger buildings have cladding
mid-rise and high-rise buildings like these have more code requirements for things like
fire protection when the panels they arrive here now there is the they're already being laid up
they're ready for the final lamination and then they go for a junction box and connection
so they basically go and encapsulate the solar cells between two layers so the oxygen and the
water cannot get to them so the biggest enemy of solar cells is oxygen water and nature
right they have you have to keep them away from them so the glass is protecting the solar cells
but the good thing is the glass is also protecting the building so it's a dual purpose for their
cladding products and their roof products they use traditional monocrystalline cells that are
very efficient but they even have glass window products that can produce solar by using thin film
our preference is to use silicon because it's it's cheaper it's more efficient
and it's easier to use than than thin film at the moment
but there are some applications for thin film and it's based on the limitations of silicon where
the cell size is is pretty fixed you're fixed to this square this blue square this blue rectangle
where the thin film can be done in little strips and these little strips you know you can
change the the density of the strips the spacing between the strips to create a transparent effect
there are thin films that reach up to 22 so if you imagine that you want a 50 transparent
window you're getting 10 it always depends on how transparent you want this to be so the more
layers of thin film you have the darker the window shading will be but the more electricity you can
produce so if you've ever seen huge skyscrapers seemingly built out of glass well even those can
produce solar power again this technology is called building integrated photovoltaic which
means we shouldn't be thinking about generating electricity as an afterthought but instead at
the core of the design of the building this could mean intentionally designing building structures
to be better optimized for capturing sunlight and that's where the technology has the potential to
be a real game changer while it can certainly be retrofitted onto existing buildings it's really
about looking into the future with a mindset of energy efficiency from the very beginning
and then there's a question of cost installing solar on a house is a tough proposition because
you're asking a homeowner with a mortgage to spend tens of thousands of dollars on additional stuff
but in larger buildings the economics change because unlike stucco or citing for a house the
cladding that you see is actually already pretty expensive so metrex believes their products can
be built and sold for comparable prices maybe a little bit more expensive but a cost that they can
recoup in just two years with energy production it's not just the size of buildings it's
everything things like walkways and bridges and here's another example of the company clarifies
cladding around this bridge and that could in the future all be solar producing metrics even
has a roof product more like the solar panels you're thinking of but they can actually match
your roof material so if you have a slate roof or asphalt shingle metal whatever the case might be
you can send them what you would like and they can make their panels look just like your roof but
the installation is still the same as a typical panel so that's another option that they provide
also one other final use case that i find really interesting is you've ever seen this this is a
wall that is built on freeways to keep all that freeway noise out of residential neighborhoods and
currently they're just dumb they don't actually do anything as part of our research and development
we are constantly developing new products this is our highway noise barrier they look
just like traditional uh you know solar panels but they are actually embedded into a noise barrier
system for highways how does that work that's a secret sauce of creating a glass that's absorbing
the sound and the sunlight at the same time so if all this is sounding pretty awesome yeah that's
why we wanted to make this video but it's not all roses and rainbows there are some challenges for
sure first of all they have to reach scale of production which is always a challenge
but also there's the issue of the angle that the sunlight is coming in at understanding
solar generation as a function of the location of the sun requires talking about flux the equation
for electric flux is as follows which means when the sun is directly perpendicular to the panels
you'll get 100 output theoretically this would be like having a rooftop solar panel at high noon
in the summer somewhere along the equator but having solar cladding on the sides of buildings
changes some things if you live in the northern hemisphere having solar on the south facing part
of your building is an obvious choice but east and west could make sense too especially west and
that's because typically when the sun is setting that's when energy prices tend to go up and even
if you have shading in other things you're still going to be producing electricity here's the thing
if it's costing me a hundred dollar per square foot to put a panel on the south or the north
and it's comparable to other materials even 50 is better than zero so that there's no difference in
price there's no if the price difference is the same or is so close i would not see the
difference so a lot of our customers they ask can we just do two three sides and when we give them
the proposal for each site separately they end up saying yeah it makes sense it's just do the
whole thing because in a package it still makes sense having a building that produces a lot of
solar power can be quite lucrative especially if you could sell excess power or charge electric
vehicles in your garages it could just be a big time incentive for both the builders
and also for the occupants and tenants that move into these buildings but the cool thing is that
the incentives don't just stop for the builders any company that moves into a building with bipv
can claim that they're carbon neutral without having to do any extra work there's going to be
a lot of incentives both now and especially in the future so having future buildings built with bipv
is going to be a no-brainer if it isn't already won today so that is a look at bipv building
integrated photovoltaics you know how much i love solar panels and i've always thought what
can we do about urban city centers and high-rise buildings and i think we might finally have our
answer but what do you think are you excited about bipv solar do you think it's the future of urban
higher density city centers we'd love to hear from you in the comments below