Renewable and sustainable energy generation technologies have been in the forefront due to concerns related to environment, energy independence, and high fossil fuel costs. As part of the EU’s 2020 targets, it is aimed to reach a 20% share of renewable energy sources in final energy consumption by 2020, according to EU’s renewable energy directive. Within this context national renewable energy targets were set for each EU country ranging between 10% (for Malta) and 49% (for Sweden). A large share of renewable energy research has been devoted to photovoltaic systems which harness the solar energy to generate electrical power. As an application of the PV technology, building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) systems have attracted an increasing interest in the past decade, and have been shown as a feasible renewable power generation technology to help buildings partially meet their load. In addition to BIPV, building integrated photovoltaic/thermal systems (BIPV/T) provide a very good potential for integration into the building to supply both electrical and thermal loads. In this study, we comprehensively reviewed the BIPV and BIPVT applications in terms of energy generation amount, nominal power, efficiency, type and performance assessment approaches. The two fundamental research areas in the BIPV and BIPVT systems are observed to be i) improvements on system efficiency by ventilation, hence obtaining a higher yield with lowering the panel temperature ii) new thin film technologies that are well suited for building integration. Several approaches to achieve these objectives are reported in the literature as presented in this paper. It is expected that this comprehensive review will be beneficial to researchers and practitioners involved or interested in the design, analysis, simulation, and performance evaluation, financial development and incentives, new methods and trends of BIPV systems

This paper presents a holistic approach to assess the energy performance of a naturally ventilated PV façade system. A rigorous combined experimental and numerical approach is established. The real energy performance of the system has been evaluated through a long-term high resolution monitoring of a typical ventilated PV façade system. A numerical model based on TRaNsient SYstem Simulation (TRNSYS) package was developed to assess the thermal and energy performance of the system, which has been verified by a series of statistical analysis using the data collected from the experiment. The validated model was then used to assess the energy and thermal performance of a 7.4 kWp prototype ventilated PV façade system in Izmir, Turkey. The results of this study demonstrated that ventilation in the air cavity of the PV façade system could significantly improve energy performance of the system even in a southeast facing façades. The quantitative analysis provides useful guidance to the system designers for the improvement of energy efficiency of the PV facade system.