Community and socio-political acceptance of building-integrated photovoltaics

The integration of photovoltaics in buildings is a rising field of action in the renewable energy sector. Especially in view of the federal Energy Strategy 2050 with its goal of an increasing share of solar energy, PV technology will play an important role in the future. It is crucial to find optimal solutions to integrate this technology in our built environment, because open space systems have higher impacts on landscape, ecosystems and suffer under low social acceptance in Switzerland. That’s why building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) could be a promising solution, especially in Switzerland with its high population density. However, BIPV might itself be associated with acceptance problems and the corresponding research has been so far quite scarce, which is at least partly a consequence of the relative novelty of this technology. Within NRP70 project “Next Generation Photovoltaics”, an interdisciplinary group of researchers including economists, behavioural scientists, environmental scientists, geographers and engineers is dealing with community and socio-political acceptance of BIPV in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Regarding community acceptance, the attitudes of the community members from the German-speaking part of Switzerland towards the most important acceptance factors identified within a desk research are going to be explored on a sample of 500 persons being representative for Switzerland in terms of age and sex. Regarding the socio-political acceptance, 2 focus group interviews are planned with the main stakeholders involved in the BIPV value chain, including representatives from the various levels of public administration, technology providers and planning agencies. The first results are expected by the middle of May