Edmonton apartment retrofit wins Guinness record for largest solar artwork

This article was published by The Energy Mix on July 21, 2025.

By Mitchell Beer

Guinness World Records has a shiny, new entry after an apartment building in Edmonton, supplied by Etobicoke-based Mitrex Integrated Solar Technology, earned recognition for the world’s largest solar panel artwork.

The SunRise Retrofit features an 29-metre mural made of building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) and created by local artist Lance Cardinal, a member of the Bigstone Cree Nation. It’s “part of a retrofit that added over 2,000 panels on all sides of the building across a palette of black, red, blue, yellow, orange, green, and brown,” Sustainable Biz Canada reports.

The 265-kilowatt project can “power a significant portion of The SunRise’s operations and offset 150 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year,” the news story states.

The project “incorporates a BIPV facade on all elevations of the 12-storey building, with a fully solar mural on the north façade,” concludes [pdf] a Mitrex case study. “Initially, the client, Avenue Living Asset Management, planned to use fibre cement siding as the cladding solution for the retrofit. However, Mitrex proposed a BIPV façade that would help achieve the client’s goal of a 50% reduction in carbon emissions, a requirement for securing retrofit financing” from the Canada Infrastructure Bank.

The system is expected to cut energy costs for the building, previously known as Capital Towers, by $80,000 per year, for a four-year return on investment.

During installation, “Mitrex’s panels were seamlessly integrated into a standard rainscreen system, ensuring ease of installation and durability for the retrofit,” the case study adds. “The advanced panel construction minimized maintenance requirements, resulting in significantly lower long-term maintenance costs for the façade.” The mural, which also incorporates PV panels, was a collaboration among multiple local artists, “with elements that celebrate Edmonton’s Indigenous heritage and multicultural roots,” the company writes.

“This project is a major source of pride for us—not only because it is a solar building that showcases the world’s largest BIPV mural wall (recognized by the Guinness World Records), but also because of the powerful social impact it represents,” Mitrex Marketing Specialist Maria Paula Pallares Avendano said in an email.

When it’s complete later this year, the project will help the company “expand our outreach and spread the word that BIPV is here, it’s real, and it’s going to change the way we build,” CEO Danial Hadizadeh told Sustainable Biz.

“The façade around The SunRise features yellow and light blue solar panels, typically a hindrance to the overall performance. This is because generally the darker the panel, the more efficiently it runs,” the industry publication writes, citing Hadizadeh. Electricity generation from the Mitrex installation ranges from five watts per square foot with the lightest colour to 18 watts per square foot with the darkest.

“But compared to the alternative with no BIPV on the building,” Sustainable Biz says, the project still “represents a sustainability win, even if the efficiency may not be ideal because of the decision to incorporate a colourful display.”