Our laboratory is one of the leading institutes in the field of photovoltaic and some of our activities are focused on BIPV (http://pvlab.epfl.ch/) . We are already involved in different projects on this topic and would be extremely interested in taking part in one project on low energy buildings as described in the call for proposal mentioned above, in which photovoltaic would be used as renewable energy or studied as perspective in order to further improve the energy efficiency of low energy buildings (towards neutral buildings).

Our role in such a project could be on the following topics:

• Expertise in photovoltaics
• Assessment of energy gains compared to additional costs due to the integration of PV on low energy buildings.
• State of the art on roof and facade elements (insulating façade elements for instance) which would be compatible with PV integration (crystalline silicon or thin film silicon technologies),
• Design of new elements (single or double function such as isolation/),
• Development, fabrication/demonstration of prototypes,
• Reliability testing of the modules/PV elements