Investigating the Use of Indoor Photovoltaic Products towards the Sustainability of a Building Environment

Sustainability in buildings could be mainly achieved by the incorporation of smart grid systems in a building context. These systems are based on renewable energy sources and require low production of CO2 emissions. Additionally, product-integrated PV could also contribute in building's sustainability. The term 'product-integrated PV' (PIPV) stands for all types of products that contain solar cells in at least one of their surfaces with the objective to provide power during product's use. The use of PV products in an indoor environment is not quite developed so far, due to the low performance of those products under low levels of indoor irradiance and limited research activity in the field. However, there are PV products that are commercially available today and could be successfully used in an office environment. In this study three commercially available PV-powered products for use in an office environment; a PV-powered keyboard, a computer mouse and an office lamp, are analyzed. The results present qualitative data, with focus on users' preference to introduce PV-powered products in their daily lives, as well as their beliefs regarding the sustainability of these products. A statistical analysis is also presented, together with a comparison of the tested PV-powered products with their non-PV-powered counterparts, in order to estimate how sustainable PV products are and which is their contribution to building sustainability. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.