Solar panels as a renewable energy source are demanded globally. When covering roof tops, there are limited space for skylights and other traditional daylighting systems to provide sufficient levels of required daylight indoors. Will the demand for innovative technologies, such as fiber optic daylighting, increase due to this specific issue?
Renewable energy is a fast-growing energy source globally. Solar panels are one of the renewable energy sources.
Today more than half of the world’s population lives in cities and if the urbanization and people growth continues in the same way, it is expected that 2,5 billion more people will live in cities in year 2050.
The urbanization creates today a huge interest for densify the cities and at many places in the world this means that the daylight will be a challenge. Deep buildings, dens block structure, increased demands on energy efficiency and older buildings to be adapted to new types of uses means that more and more people risk to end up in living and working environments with insufficient daylight. One of the greatest challenges today is to ensure that urbanization is not done at the expense of human health and good indoor environments.
In cities, more and more building roof tops are utilized as space for solar panels.
With the urbanization and the climate challenges we stand in front of, it is easy to guess that the utilization of solar panels will increase even more.
Solar panels utilizes large areas of roof tops. Less space on the roof tops, impacts the possibilities to use traditional daylighting systems such as skylights, atriums and even tubular daylighting devices, which also uses large areas of roof tops.
Large luxury multistory buildings will still be able to have atriums and give sufficient levels of daylight, but how about the majority of buildings?
Spreading sunlight in the building
Parans Fiber Optic Daylighting system utilize minimal space on the roof versus how much natural light it could lead to the indoor environment. 30 floors down. With thin flexible cables, minimal intrusion is made, but a lot of natural light is transported indoors. Not only could fiber optic daylighting be an extension of a window, but also create an artificial skylight, when traditional skylights or atriums are not possible.
Image: Parans project Parans Technology Center in Vienna, Austria,
Read more about the project at Archello or at Parans website under “customers”
Parans lead sunlight deep into buildings and far away from windows. With the use of highly intelligent technology, we make sunlight an indoor experience. Get in contact with us and we could tell you more.
