A Systematic Review of the Scalability of Building-Integrated Photovoltaics from a Multidisciplinary Perspective

Over the past two decades, Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) has become a core technology in the green building sector, driven by global carbon-neutrality goals and the growing demand for sustainable design. This review adopts a scalability-oriented perspective and systematically examines 82 peer-reviewed articles published between 2001 and 2025. The results indicate that existing research is dominated by studies on electrical and thermal performance, with East Asia and Europe—particularly China, Japan, and Germany—emerging as the most active regions. This dominance matters for scalability because real projects must satisfy comfort, compliance, buildability, and operation/maintenance constraints alongside energy yield; limited evidence in these dimensions increases delivery risk when transferring solutions across regions and building types. Accordingly, we interpret the observed distribution as an evidence-maturity pattern: performance gains are increasingly well characterized, whereas deployment-relevant uncertainties (e.g., boundary-condition sensitivity and validation depth) remain less consistently reported. Multidimensional integration of thermal, optical, and electrical functions is gaining momentum; however, user-centered performance dimensions remain underexplored. Simulation-based approaches still prevail, whereas large-scale empirical studies are limited. The review also reveals extensive interdisciplinary collaboration but also identifies a notable lack of architectural perspectives. Using Biblioshiny, this study maps co-authorship networks and research structures. Based on the evidence, we propose future research directions to enhance the practical scalability of BIPV, including strengthening interdisciplinary integration, expanding empirical validation, and developing product-level design strategies.