The utilization of solar energy has steadily increased over the last decades leading to a considerable expansion and development of the solar industry. Buildings are one of the most important application sectors for solar energy technologies since they can contribute to reducing the carbon footprint of the built environment. Further research opportunities are still growing, looking at novel building applications, using innovative materials devices, advanced system configurations, design and management strategies, and novel modelling and assessment techniques.

Making solar technologies cost-effective, reducing the environmental and cost impacts of their production, installation, and disposal processes (i.e., life-cycle analysis, LCA), allowing the integration with existing facilities and infrastructures, and technical and economic optimization of design and management, smart controls, market, and policy aspects are some of the outstanding challenges.

Therefore, this special issue is intended to gather significant research contributions and review papers on theoretical and practical applications of innovative solar technologies in buildings. It will accept articles reporting original research with recent experimental and numerical findings on technical and economic optimization of solar system processes in buildings. Comparisons between market-ready solar technologies and promising innovative solutions based (but not limited to) on LCA techniques and heuristic approaches are particularly welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Advanced solar thermal collectors for building applications
• Photovoltaic (PV) and hybrid PV systems in building
• Advanced photoactive materials for building
• Hybrid and integrated thermal and photovoltaic technologies in building
• Thermal and electrical energy storage solutions for solar systems in buildings
• Solar cooling and passive solar systems
• Innovative numerical modelling approaches for solar systems
• Smart control algorithms for advanced solar systems
• Life-cycle analyses of advanced and innovative solar technologies
• Thermal and electrical energy storage solutions for solar systems in building
• Energy flexibility and demand response techniques for solar energy technologies
• Investment, markets, and policy assessments of solar technologies