S.O.L.I.D

According to Dr Uli Jakob, Vice President of the “Green Chiller - Association for Sorption Cooling”, the solar cooling sector may soon experience a shift from small series production of a niche market to considerable manufacturing quantities. Jakob points out two signs supporting such a development: First, the approval of the IEA-SHC task 48, “Quality Assurance and Support Measures for Solar Cooling“; second, the recent market entry of big players, such as Stiebel Eltron (Germany) and Hitachi (Japan).
Photo: Bärbel Epp

On the 15^th of May, the city of Graz saw the inauguration of another large-scale solar thermal installation (from left): Dr. Wolfgang Messner (Graz AG), Andrea Pavlovec-Meixner and Sonja Grabner (municipal councillors), Christian Holter (S.O.L.I.D) and Wolfgang Malik (Graz AG). Photo: Graz AG

It is one of the world's most efficient solar thermal installations: the solar thermal pre-heating system, which Gatorade, a subsidiary of the US-American soft drink producer PepsiCo, had installed this year in a factory in Arizona, US. The company responsible for designing the Arizonan installation was the Austrian manufacturer S.O.L.I.D. GmbH. “We are confident that the installation will reach a specific annual yield of 1,200 kWh/m²,” Harald Blazek from S.O.L.I.D GmbH's Project Development department announced.

Solar thermal installation on top of this huge banking complex in Lisbon: The Portuguese state bank Caixa Geral de Depositos (CGD) commissioned the Austrian engineering company S.O.L.I.D. to design the solar cooling plant.
Photo: S.O.L.I.D.