A company in Toronto is installing North America’s biggest solar wall to date, a 7,000-square-foot system located in an industrial area of Rexdale Blvd. in west-end Etobicoke.
The “record-breaking wall”, produced by local solar manufacturer Mitrex, will generate 90,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, blogTO reports. Those energy savings are expected to cover the cost of the system in “just a few years”.
The installation uses building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), an array of solar panels that “replicate the exterior finishes of typical buildings you see walking down any city street, all while harnessing the green energy of the sun,” the blog post explains. “In most cases, passersby would have few clues alerting them to the eco-friendly power plants hidden in these panels.”
The blogTO post focuses mostly on the aesthetic potential in BIPV, noting that “these power-producing panels can take on just about any look like stone or even wood”. The Etobicoke wall “might not win any design awards,” adds author Jack Landau, but the technology still “has sweeping implications for how we design cities.”
