Development and implementation of BIPV courseware for higher education and professionals

Abstract

It is generally expected that in the future, photovoltaics will be able to contribute substantially to the mainstream power production, and that through their widespread commercialization, Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) systems will become the backbone of the zero-energy building (ZEB) European target for 2020. An outlook on the BIPV market estimated the worldwide installed BIPV capacity during 2016 to nearly 2 GW, confirming the growing trend, increasing by 12.6% compared to 2015, when 1.78 GW were installed [1]. This paper presents the results of the Dem4BIPV project (http://www.dem4bipv.eu/), which has been designed to develop innovative master-level courseware for various European academic institutes focusing on Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) in order to bridge the existing knowledge gaps in education of the target audiences (students and professionals in the building sector) as well as to create awareness on the subject. A project survey among BIPV stakeholders showed that lack of education is one of the barriers to BIPV deployment helping at the same time to identify teaching goals and subsequently courses addressing the needs of each target audience related to BIPV. Finally, a full 40 ECTS curriculum on BIPV was developed and is briefly presented in this paper.