Fanshawe College's solar cladding is expected to supply around 18% of near-term power

At Fanshawe College's Innovation Village in London, Ontario, the solar panels go all the way around. The Diamond Schmitt-designed hub, which brings previously disconnected parts of the campus together in one building for learning, research and collaboration, has custom photovoltaic cladding on every elevation, north face included. The completed facade is rated at 174.86 kWp nominal and is estimated to generate 122.98 MWh of electricity a year, according to a November 12 ArchDaily feature by Kiana Buchberger on the work of SolarLab, which supplied the system.

Projects that publish capacity, expected yield and share of building load together are rare, which makes this one useful to an owner's project manager or a campus facilities director weighing a solar facade. The same account also shows the less obvious limit. The material that protects the solar cells keeps PV panels below the A2 class under the European fire standard, and that shapes the wall assembly long before anyone argues about output.

What the Fanshawe output figures say

The facade is expected to supply around 18% of the building's near-term power requirements. A rooftop photovoltaic array is also planned, and together the two systems are projected to meet roughly 30% of the building's total energy demand. An early cost-benefit analysis helped show that the application was feasible.

Dividing the estimated output by the rated capacity gives roughly 700 kWh per kWp a year. That's our arithmetic on the published figures, not a number SolarLab reported. For a rough comparison, a worked example in Heaven Green Energy's BIPV glossary models a south-facing vertical curtain wall in Ahmedabad, India, at about 880 kWh per kWp using a PVGIS simulation. The climates, latitudes and orientations differ, so the gap tells you nothing about panel quality. It does give a team a quick check on whether a facade estimate falls in a plausible range.

The same example offers a second reference point, this one for the share of load. Its 384 kWp array of 1,200 glass-glass modules spans 2,400 square metres of curtain wall on a 12,000-square-metre office building and is projected to cover about 15% of that building's electricity consumption. Building use, size and climate all differ from Fanshawe's, but the two modeled projects landing in the mid-to-high teens suggests that an owner should expect a facade to be a meaningful contributor, not the whole answer.

A 174.86 kWp facade expected to cover about 18% of a teaching building's near-term power is a useful benchmark, and it was reached with panels on every elevation, the north face included. The team handled the north side with geometry. Upward-tilted active panels alternate with smaller, offset passive pieces of coated low-iron glass, and the custom-sized mix of active and passive units gives one consistent blue-toned surface, which shifts subtly with the light, while letting generating cells sit where they contribute most.

Why owners put generation on the walls

ArchDaily's feature pairs Fanshawe with a second SolarLab project, so the Amsterdam example is best read as a contrast in design priorities from the same supplier, not as an outside check on the Ontario figures. On the Student Experience International building by VURB Architects, each panel is tilted individually and has a satin finish and a horizontal rotation. As the sun moves, the facade shifts between blue-grey and silver-grey tones, and glare is kept down. Durability and easier maintenance come from a small range of panel formats combined with a flexible mounting system.

The bigger lesson there is about the roof. With generation moved onto the walls, the Amsterdam roof stays free for green areas and shared outdoor use, and that matters on any site where roof area already has a competing use. Independent sources make the same point from different directions. Gensler senior project designer Ho Lun Chiang, in a paper for the Facade Tectonics Institute on the Bakar Lab for Energy and Materials, a UC Berkeley climate-tech incubator, argues that conventional rooftop PV is constrained by extensive roof equipment and, in some cases, dense urban surroundings, and notes that laboratories are among the most energy-intensive building types.

Heaven Green Energy's glossary puts a number on the opportunity, saying facade BIPV can multiply a building's available solar area by three to five times compared with a roof-only system. For a campus facilities director, the combined reading suggests the facade case is strongest where the roof is already spoken for by plant, amenity space or its own array. Fanshawe sits in that last category, with a rooftop system planned to stack on top of the cladding's contribution.

The 0.9 mm layer that shapes the fire strategy

SolarLab says the polymer encapsulant around PV cells, about 0.9 mm thick, keeps every PV panel, conventional or building-integrated, from reaching an A2 classification under EN 13501-1:2018. In its own fire tests, the company checks how high temperatures affect the EVA encapsulant and the glass layers in both its glass-glass and glass-backsheet panels, and those panels have achieved B-s1,d0. For its System 25, the company has also passed the North American NFPA 285 and NFPA 268 tests, as well as module tests covering hail impact, wet leakage current and how well the electrical terminations hold up.

With PV panels unable to reach A2, the rest of the wall likely has to carry more of the fire-safety work. In a ventilated rainscreen, the cavity behind the panels runs alongside electrical components, so fire-blocking, material choices and local code requirements all have to be settled together. In its SP Fire 105 test, SolarLab examined how correctly installed, fully sealed passive fire stops help limit vertical fire spread in ventilated facades, and project-specific testing can document compliance where a local regulator asks for it.

The fire question also sits inside a longer coordination list. As the design develops, the ArchDaily account says, wiring, mounting rails, joints, tolerances, ventilation cavities, monitoring and maintenance all have to be reconciled with structural and fire-protection requirements. Every one of those items touches the cavity where the fire stops live, which is why the fire strategy can't wait for the panel layout to be final.

For owners or jurisdictions that expect A2 cladding, timing could matter most. Understanding the limitation early allows facade details to be engineered accordingly and a fire strategy to be developed from the project's early stages.

Two test sites and a long project team

The Fanshawe panels were fabricated outside Canada. Components were tested both offshore and on site and labeled to meet Canadian regulations. Detailed on-site mock-ups checked fit and alignment.

Each active panel sets the cells inside laminated safety glass on a precision aluminum substructure sized for local wind and snow loads, with concealed fixings and a ventilated cavity. The cladding also had to line up with the insulation, subframing, weather barriers and fire-blocking behind it.

The roster on Chiang's Bakar Lab project shows how many parties end up sharing that coordination on a comparable US building. There, PV-integrated glass covers the whole south-facing facade of a multistory atrium, harvesting solar energy to directly power the building while providing shade, thermal comfort and natural ventilation for users. The credited team runs from the owner, Addison Labs Foundation, and its owner's representative, A Square Project Solutions, to a facade consultant (Heintges), a separate PV consultant (SolMotiv), a curtain wall contractor (PNA) and a general contractor (Turner Construction).

Splitting facade and PV expertise between two consultants is a useful signal for owners scoping fees. It suggests that on a building where the glass both encloses and generates, the envelope and the electrical system are each specialist enough to warrant their own adviser.

Why the biggest output can be the wrong target

Simulation is how teams decide where panels belong. SolarLab uses contextual 3D models and local climate data to estimate solar exposure by orientation, nearby obstructions, panel angle and surface treatment, with visualizations and data graphs that let teams compare configurations side by side. Its tools work in Rhino and Grasshopper and in CAD and BIM, and an online calculator gives a first estimate of material costs. Detail builds up as the layout firms up, and the stated aim is to find where panels work best without covering every available surface.

Research published in October 2026 in ARPHA Proceedings, in the volume for the CAUSummit 2026 congress, tests the obvious assumption here. Gevher Kaya, Figen Beyhan and Evser Civelek modeled 456 photovoltaic shading scenarios for İzmir, Türkiye, in EnergyPlus, combining three window-to-facade width ratios, 19 tilt angles and eight orientations, and tracked lighting performance alongside energy. Their Pareto analysis found a clear trade-off between maximizing PV generation and minimizing the building's total electricity use, and no single configuration came out best on every objective.

What the authors did find is that specific combinations of orientation, window ratio and tilt deliver a more balanced result, which they mapped using parallel coordinate plots. The study covers one climate and one device type. Still, it suggests that a facade judged only on kilowatt-hours generated could raise the building's overall power bill, and that the comparison tools SolarLab describes are most useful when they score consumption as well as output.

The academic literature is still catching up on the architectural side of that question. A bibliometric review in Ain Shams Engineering Journal covering 2,438 Scopus-indexed publications from 1971 to 2025 found exponential growth in PV-building research after 2015, but concluded that aesthetics, facade integration and typological diversity remain underexplored. For a team weighing a north elevation like Fanshawe's, that could mean detailed project accounts carry as much practical evidence as the research base does.

Cost points the same direction: model early and place panels selectively. Heaven Green Energy's glossary, written for the Indian market, puts BIPV capital cost at two to four times conventional rooftop solar per kWp, partly offset by the glazing or cladding the panels replace. Its worked example lands on a payback of roughly a decade or more. It also calls adding BIPV to a finished building technically possible but economically impractical, because the conventional envelope is already installed and paid for. For owners planning a new building or a recladding, that suggests the decision belongs in early design. For a recently finished envelope, the case looks much weaker.

What the 2027 testing round could settle

SolarLab says it is working on more certifications for markets abroad, the United States and Canada among them, and plans further testing in 2027. For North American specifiers, that list will show how much fire documentation a BIPV wall still needs on each project.

At Fanshawe, the planned rooftop array is the next step toward the projected 30%. After that, metered output from a full Ontario year could show how the facade compares with its 122.98 MWh annual estimate.