ColorFoil - Polymer foil with structural colors for energy efficient coloration of solar panels

Colored photovoltaic solutions enable an important contribution to create or maintain architectural and aesthetic expressions to buildings while producing local energy, mostly used by the building, and reducing the need for expensive grid expansions. For this reason, the coloration of photovoltaic panels is requested by building owners, architects, municipalities and other stakeholders in the building sector.

A colored interlayer foil is already today implemented in the photovoltaic (PV) panel production as a layer in front of the PV cells, where it is protected behind a glass front cover. However, today’s interlayer foils come with a coloration loss of 20-50 % and with higher coloration losses for the colors traditionally used in the building sector such as tile red.

Within this project an interlayer foil based on structural colors for making an efficient, cost effective and angle independent way of coloring PV panels for building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) and building attached photovoltaics (BAPV) will be developed and demonstrated.

The project’s success criteria are:

• At least 3 colors available with angle-independent appearance.
• Power loss less than 10% for colorization matching a color chart
• Material compatibility passing the IEC 61215 including damp heat and UV exposure.
• Color stability after UV exposure equivalent to 15 years in a Danish context (60 kwh/m2 yr).
• Roll-to-roll production of the foil.
• Material cost price of less than 5€/m2.

We expect that coloration will enable a strong differentiator in the competitive market for PV panels. The colored foil will be made available to manufacturers of BIPV photovoltaic panels, where a quantum leap in the balance between color appearance and power efficiency will be offered.