As codes push down the glazed share of a façade, the solid part can carry photovoltaics. Oliver Ng, Pete Kennon, Bobby Wei, Blair Stratton and Stefan Brey took BIPV from 550 Spencer’s thin-film skin through the wiring and inverters of delivery to the fire and compliance questions it raises.
As construction codes tighten and all-glazed façades struggle to hit energy ratings, the industry is moving to a roughly 50/50 or 60/40 solid-to-glazed ratio, and if a façade must be partly solid, the argument runs, that solid part may as well generate power. Oliver Ng of BG&E Façades took PV and solar façades from design to delivery with Pete Kennon of Studio Kennon, Bobby Wei of Bates Smart, fire engineer Blair Stratton of RED Fire Engineers, and Stefan Brey of BG&E.
Pete Kennon told the story of 550 Spencer, commissioned around 2020. Rather than accept a dead solid panel, he pitched a solar-panelled façade, a German thin-film product not previously used in the southern hemisphere, to a client who had inherited the land. Driving past, you barely register where the PV cells are; the point was to make the solid skin work for the building.
The delivery reality, the panel agreed, is that a PV façade is as much an electrical and coordination problem as an architectural one: panels, inverters, wiring and connections all have to sit behind the façade and be coordinated with the build, and their long-term performance and maintenance designed for from the start.
Fire safety and compliance were the third strand. Blair Stratton, who leads the fire design for a Melbourne tower carrying roughly 3,000 square metres of BIPV, spoke to the fire and code questions that building-integrated PV raises, a live issue in a market still shaped by the combustible-cladding reckoning. Bobby Wei brought the architect’s benchmark projects, among them 171 Collins Street and the sustainability exemplar at 435 Bourke Street, while Stefan Brey, a mechanical engineer by training, formerly of Arup, grounded the discussion in the manufacturing and building-physics detail of actually getting these façades built.
