Paper Alert: Integrated photovoltaics innovation and collaboration

Photovoltaics has made extraordinary progress over the past decades, largely driven by two objectives: higher efficiency and lower cost.

But as solar moves beyond conventional power plants and rooftops, we believe that another dimension of innovation is becoming increasingly important: DESIGN.

Imagine photovoltaics seamlessly integrated into buildings, vehicles, infrastructure, consumer products, wearables or sensors, turning surfaces that already exist into surfaces that can also generate clean electricity.
For this to happen at scale, efficiency alone is not enough.

PV technologies increasingly need to respond to very different application requirements: colour, curvature, flexibility, lightweight construction, safety, reliability, transparency, aesthetics and user experience.

And this leads to perhaps the most important message of our article:
The future of integrated photovoltaics cannot be developed by the PV community alone.

We need much stronger collaboration between PV scientists and engineers, designers, architects, automotive companies, product developers, manufacturers, standardization bodies, policymakers, and ultimately users.

This also changes how we think about PV innovation: instead of first developing a solar technology and then asking “Where can we use it?”, we increasingly need to start with the application and ask “What kind of solar technology does this application need?”
Integrated PV can help transform passive surfaces into multifunctional energy-generating surfaces, bringing electricity generation closer to where energy is actually consumed.

A great collaborative effort from,Angele Reinders, Kaining Ding, Bin Luo, Wouter Eggink, Antonin Faes, Aïcha Hessler-Wyser and Christophe Ballif, bringing together expertise from Eindhoven University of Technology, Forschungszentrum Jülich, University of Twente, CSEM and EPFL PV-lab.

Published in Nature Energy:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-026-02132-4