Solar Cooling

This report was from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) Annual Meeting in October, 2009. The report is broken down to cover state incentives & policy trends, solar installation trends, net metering & interconnection updates & trends, and workforce development and training.

This is a presentation of SorTech AG, a manufacturer of small and medium scale adsorption chillers for cooling and air-conditioning applications, which was used for a training course on solar cooling systems.

37 commercially installed solar thermal systems of between 50 and 500 m² received subsidies in Thailand over the last two years. Nevertheless, the sector shows a lack of professional service to operate these solar systems at an optimum efficiency.
Photo: STA

This report from 2009 provides an overview of the SOLCO project. Supported by the Intelligent Energy Europe Programme of the European Commission, this project tries to look into ways of removing barriers that hamper the dissemination of solar cooling plants in European Southern regions such as the Canary Islands, Crete, Cyprus and Sicily, where the high solar radiation is ideal for solar cooling implementation.

One of the successful show cases of solar cooling applications in France: The vinery in Banyuls, in the south of France, where 130 m² of vacuum tube collectors supply an absorption chiller with 52 kW cooling capacity since 1991.
Photo: Tecsol

This report was written by the Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE), in association with the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2004.

This presentation was given by Hans-Martin Henning from the Fraunhofer-Institut for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg, Germany, during the Renewable Energy Week in Brussels in 2007.

Mr Hans-Martin Henning explains with these slides solar cooling and air conditioning processes and technologies, examples of solar cooling usage (factories, conferece centers, hotels and wine stores), current status and outlook as well.

This short document, produced by the International Energy Agency, provides a summary of the solar heating and cooling situation in 2009.

The document is divided in different sections: market status; economics; outlook; system related aspects; environmental impact; technology status development; which touch upon different issues ranging from the installed capacity, to solar resources of different countries, drivers and barriers for growth, etc.

The Advanced Building Systems Integration Consortium (ABSIC) is an industry-university partnership aimed at researching on possibilities to improve building and systems' efficiency.

This presentation goes through a specific project with a twofold objective: design a more efficient solar thermal system and improve the efficiency of existing systems, based on a given building heating and cooling demands.

Results showed that the performance of the systems can be improved up to 27% in winter (around 3MWh) and 49.2% in summer (around 7MWh).

Pre-sizing tool online: The international consortium of the European Project SolarCombi+ has just published an online calculation tool for solar heating and cooling projects with a cooling capacity of up to 20 kW.