If you have a chance to visit the Enwave Theatre at Harbourfront Centre this summer, be sure to check out striking new work by local glass artist Sarah Hall.

Hall is the creator of Waterglass, part of a new water-inspired envelope constructed around the theatre that combines air-brushed art and solar cells with insulating glass, which wraps bright waves of blue around the building’s north, east and west façades.

Only the west façade includes the solar cells – 540 cells on 10 panels, in total – but it’s a first for Toronto, and an example of the potential of what the solar industry calls building-integrated photovoltaics, or BIPV.

In Ontario we currently slap solar panels on the ground and existing residential and commercial rooftops. BIPV, on the other hand, isn’t added on after the fact. Right from the start solar cells are embedded into a building’s envelope, be it roof shingles, skylights, windows or siding.

Since you have to pay for the shingles or windows or other materials anyway – as well as their installation—the argument is that you can generate clean electricity from those materials by paying a bit of a premium.

“Solar moves from being just an energy source to also being a building component,” says Rob McMonagle, a senior advisor in Toronto’s economic development department who specializes in green technology.

The problem is that BIPV, while quite visible throughout Europe and growing in popularity in Japan and China, has gained little traction in Canada. This includes Ontario, despite the province’s stature as one of the leading solar markets in North America.

The main reason is that the feed-in-tariff (FIT) program designed and administered by the Ontario Power Authority never took the potential of BIPV into account. The generous rates paid out for solar electricity are for projects built on existing infrastructure. There’s nothing in the program that encourages solar technology to be built directly into new infrastructure.

But McMonagle, former head of the Canadian Solar Industries Association and a big believer in the potential of BIPV, is more optimistic these days. Energy Minister Chris Bentley, in a letter last month directing the power authority to restart the feed-in-tariff program, also asked the agency to design a sub-category within the program that is geared to solar projects on “unconstructed buildings.”

The new category needs to be implemented by the end of this year, and 15 megawatts of capacity on the grid is supposed to be earmarked for such projects in 2013.

“This is a big opportunity,” says McMonagle, who along with the Canada Green Building Council and Ontario Sustainable Energy Association had been pushing the power authority to move in this direction. “We’re now trying to engage with them to develop the rules.”

The sooner the better. Toronto has more high-rise construction going on than any other city in North America – more than seven times more construction than Chicago. With so much new building infrastructure in the works, it’s a perfect time to consider integrating solar technologies into architectural designs.

“We’ve had a lot of interest from the architect and developer communities,” says McMonagle. “They’re all saying give me more information. For them it’s also about where they can get the product locally.”

And this is where Ontario, potentially, can shine – and without the need for mandatory local content rules. A good part of the BIPV market is about custom installations that make buildings distinctive. Like the Sarah Hall project, many could be considered art.

This requires flexibility on the part of the supply chain. China excels at producing cheap items in high volumes, but when trying to meet unique architectural specifications, the Chinese edge begins to dull.

It’s generally true that the more customized a product, the more local it becomes. In this sense, BIPV – as public art, as part of private infrastructure, and as a source of clean energy in a jurisdictions experiencing a feverish pace of construction – is a good fit for Ontario.

It deserves to have its own feed-in-tariff rate. “If we can get this right for unconstructed buildings,” says McMonagle, “it has tremendous long-term potential beyond the FIT program.”

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Indeed, Ontario could do well to tap a global BIPV market expected by one estimate to reach $6 billion by 2016, at which point we’ll see more roofing and window manufacturers integrating solar into their product lines.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.