Spanish utility company Iberdrola has installed a solar array at Spain’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, totalling 80kW. Having begun construction in January, the building’s 300 solar panels will allow it to self-consume 80MWh of power per annum.
This will result in the museum saving about 5% of its electricity consumption, and an average of 30% of the building’s total demand, equating to enough power to light all of the museum’s exhibition halls. FuturaSun, an Italian solar module manufacturer, has provided the panels.
The PV project was funded by Basque Energy Agency’s European NextGenerationUE.
In line with the trend of incorporating solar panels into a building’s architecture, the panels on the museum’s two largest roofs have been installed so that they blend into the existing building’s design.
This means that the installation needed to take the building’s architecture into account during conception and construction.
The panels were designed to match the other roofing elements such as skylights, impacting the panels’ design and colour, using FuturaSun’s FU 360 M Silk Plus Silver 360 W model to implement maximum chromatic integration.
The array was signed off by the building’s architect, Frank Gehry, and the Bilbao City Council.
Sustainability plan
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s 2024-2025 environmental sustainability plan includes initiatives such as installing the solar array as part of its mission to reach carbon neutrality by 2030.
To that end, 100% of the museum’s supplied electricity has been renewable since June 1st 2024, seeing a reduction of over ¼ the building’s carbon footprint.
Additionally, the museum’s gas consumption has declined by 35% and electricity by 6% since climate and humidity controls were made more efficient in 2022.
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