The new solar panel-clad medical building under construction at the University of Toronto Scarborough.Supplied
When the University of Toronto Scarborough opens its new six-storey academy of medicine and integrated health complex next year, students and members of the public will be able to access not just state-of-the-art classrooms and labs, but also a family health clinic and a pharmacy, both of which are scarce in its corner of the city.
What they likely won’t notice, however, is the way energy courses through the building, which was designed by the Dutch architecture powerhouse MVRDV, with Diamond Schmitt as the local partners. Much of the exterior silver cladding consists of highly engineered panels that conceal photovoltaic cells - enough of them, in fact, to generate about a fifth of the building’s overall electricity consumption, thereby substantially reducing its emissions.
“The material itself is actually very beautiful and it’s very consistent with the architectural aspiration of the building in terms of what we were trying to achieve from it,” says Andrew Arifuzzaman, UTSC’s chief administrative and strategy officer. “It [will] generate about 420,000 kilowatt hours a year of power for the medical school.”
Extensive rooftop solar installations have been deployed for about two decades on buildings such as malls, distribution centres and other large-footprint structures. But taller and more slender buildings lack the roof space and thus couldn’t take advantage of the increasingly low-cost, renewable energy generated by the sun.
The UTSC project, however, represents an evolving variation on the theme, with the solar panels discretely incorporated into exterior cladding - a technique known as “building integrated photovoltaics” (BIPV). The UTSC medical building’s panels, moreover, were designed and manufactured by an Etobicoke firm, Mitrex, which has tapped into a growing national and even global appetite for this approach to greening buildings.
“The building has the potential to be a power plant,” says Mitrex founder and CEO Danial Hadizadeh. “The building cladding doesn’t have to be just aesthetic. It could be also an active energy generating facade or material.”
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The company’s panels are being incorporated in a growing portfolio of projects across Canada, including hospitals, offices, airports, and apartment buildings undergoing deep energy retrofits, as well as developments in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
While Mitrex’s highly engineered panels are somewhat more costly than ordinary cladding materials, that premium will be offset by reduced energy bills, says Mr. Arifuzzaman. “I think the value we get is well worth it in terms of reducing our carbon footprint.”
The owners of one of Mitrex’s completed BIPV projects -- an Edmonton apartment complex known as SunRise that underwent a full energy retrofit - confirm the windfall. “We chose the Mitrex system because it allowed us to turn the building’s exterior into a power plant of sorts,” Max Graham, chief operating officer for Avenue Living, said in an email. “About 90 to 95 per cent of the façade is an active solar panel, integrated directly into the cladding.”
In Alberta, where the grid is powered mainly by natural gas, he adds that the “on‑site generation has an outsized impact on a building’s emission profile. Once you factor in that we were changing the entire envelope anyway, the incremental cost of going with Mitrex instead of a more traditional cladding system made economic sense.”
In an interview, Mr. Hadizadeh says Mitrex evolved from a small construction materials company operating out of a 3,000 sq.-ft space into its current digs – a 100,000 sq.-ft manufacturing hub in Etobicoke that is quickly running out of space. The firm began developing BIPV panels about five years ago, but decided to avoid technologies that incorporated PV into windows. “We want the light to get in,” he says. “We don’t want to obstruct that. The facade is something completely out of the way. When you are inside the building, you don’t see it.”
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When Mitrex’s engineers began designing these panels, there were no regulatory standards for such products, and they had to ensure that such products conformed with existing building and fire codes. Mr. Hadizadeh adds that initially, they considered licensing BIPV products developed in Europe. “They’re very cool if you have a small project, very high end, expensive,” he says. But they proved unsuitable for large projects and so Mitrex ended up developing its own panels, which Mr. Hadizadeh says are now protected by patents.
What’s more, unlike roof-top solar, the BIPV facade panels also have to deliver from an aesthetic perspective. Firms in this space offer them in a wide range of colours, shapes and textures, although they are made primarily from specialized glass and aluminum frames, with power connections tucked behind.
One of the lingering non-engineering questions about the effectiveness of BIPV panels has to do with the orientation of the building itself. Is the amount of wall area that faces south and west sufficient to generate enough energy to justify the additional cladding cost?
The UTSC health complex, located at Morningside Avenue and Military Trail, is not only facing the right way but has a slightly elbowed configuration so large tracts of its exterior face both south and west.
Yet a 2026 academic study that modelled solar exposure for over 13,000 buildings, published by architecture scholars at the University of Iowa and the University of North Carolina (Charlotte), concluded that “vertical surfaces can receive plenty of solar irradiance for photovoltaic power generation, and for some locations, vertical surfaces receive as much or more solar irradiance than horizontal surfaces.”
For new builds, says Mr. Hadizadeh, “orientation is where we can optimize and maximize the power generation.” But on retrofit projects like SunRise, that option doesn’t exist. “We don’t really have the luxury of rotating the building. We have to work with what we have.”
But, he adds, the company and the architects it works with have found that even north-facing walls can achieve about half of the solar generating capacity as south-facing ones.
What’s more, as PV costs continue to plunge and the pace of installation surges, Mr. Hadizadeh believes BIPV is now on the cusp of a market breakthrough. “In 2026, we are finally in a place that we can deploy in millions of square feet instead of thousands of square feet.”