This apartment building needed new balcony railings. So the landlord put in solar panels

Instead of the typical glass on the balcony railings, the landlords have opted to install specially designed solar panels, manufactured in Toronto, that will generate electricity, lowering the carbon footprint and saving them on their power bill.

“This is the green economy in action,” said Stephen Job, vice-president of Tenblock, a sustainability-minded developer that advised the building owners on the project. “It’s a simple thing that fulfils its core purpose, which is safety for residents, and it has this really interesting upside: It’s going to be a little better for our business, a little bit better for the planet and it supports a local manufacturer.”

For safety reasons, balcony railings need to be replaced every 20 years, a cost that landlords budget and plan for. Adding solar panels was a little more expensive, but it comes with a 25-year performance warranty, ensuring the upgrade will pay for itself several times over.

“This is an investment that had to be made and we had a chance to put some topspin on it, both for the planet and for the business,” Job said, explaining they did one side of the building first and expect the other side to be finished by November.

Solar panels have become radically cheaper and more powerful over the past decade, and today’s systems no longer have to point directly at the sun — or even upward.

Building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) are the newest frontier of solar. Essentially solar panels in disguise, they can be made to resemble marble, wood or steel, and can be put anywhere on a building, not just the roof. They’re not science fiction, or even in the prototype phase. They’re being made in Etobicoke and installed on buildings and bridges in countries around the world right now.

“I was standing next to this black building with granite cladding and it was extremely hot, so hot you couldn’t touch the granite. And I’m thinking, this is all energy going to waste. Why are we not capturing it? Why are we not doing anything about it?” said Danial Hadizadeh, founder and CEO of Mitrex, North America’s largest manufacturer of building-integrated solar cladding.

While the Toronto company has been producing cladding for 20 years, their first BIPV panels started rolling off the line in 2021 and have been installed on a university residence in Halifax, a church in North York, a warehouse in Mississauga, an office building in Dubai and a courthouse in Midland, Ont.

The business case is simple: solar panels traditionally had to be installed on top of an already finished roof — an extra expense. But if they can be integrated into a facade that is as weatherproof and strong as regular building cladding, building owners get two-for-one: energy and envelope.

“If you look at a city, the land is extremely expensive,” Hadizadeh said, and this limits the space available for rooftop solar. “Facades are free. No one’s using them. They’re just sitting there.” 

At the company’s production facility near Martin Grove Road and Rexdale Boulevard, there are stacks of solar panels adorned with grained wood and veined marble patterns. The all-in-one facility means they’re able to test new prototypes quickly and roll out new products efficiently, he said.

But the sleek white and grey building is also a showcase for potential clients of the solar technology, which is so subtle that you’d have no idea the building is producing electricity.

“This is a solar-powered building,” Hadizadeh said. “As you’re walking in, you don’t notice the solar, but the energy is being produced. It’s all happening in the background.”

The hardest part of marketing BIPV has been convincing building owners the panels aren’t fragile, he said. So the company has posted videos of driving cars over the glass panels and hitting them with wrecking balls with no apparent effect. The panels, they say, are stronger than typical building cladding and exceed building codes.

“The first objection we get is: ‘This is not fact. This is not true. This is not going to work, is too good to be true,’ ” he said.

Having real-world examples to showcase solar cladding has convinced more and more developers and building owners to invest. The University of Toronto will be incorporating Mitrex’s BIPV on its new medical building in Scarborough.

Sweetening the deal, the federal government’s recently passed Clean Technology Investment Tax Credit has brought the cost of BIPV down even further, making it comparable to mid- to upper-tier cladding, Hadizadeh said. The refundable tax credit allows companies installing green energy or battery storage to recoup between 20 and 30 per cent of their costs.

This tax credit made the decision to invest in BIPV even more attractive, said Tenblock’s Job, who worked with owners Sabel Investments I-A Limited, Damis Properties Inc. and Microbjo Properties Inc. on the project.

“We saw it as an opportunity to be on the early adopter list at a relatively low risk,” he said.

At the Wilson Avenue apartment building, more than 1,200 linear metres of BIPV will be installed along the balconies and provide an estimated 100 megawatt hours of power per year — approximately seven per cent of the building’s central consumption (not including the power for the units).

“In these older buildings, there is actually a lot of power consumption in common areas,” he said. “All the heating, all the cooling, all that stuff is done in the central plant.”

Inexpensive, renewable power generated on site not only reduces operating costs, it cuts carbon emissions and makes the building more comfortable for tenants, he said.

“These buildings have the ability to be a climate change and affordability fighting machine.”