District Heating

Since July, the world’s biggest solar thermal plant has gradually come into operation. It produces heat for a women’s university in Saudi Arabia, the Princess Nora Bint Abdul Rahman University inaugurated at the end of 2011. From July onwards, students and staff have been moving onto the campus and with heat demand increasing, the covers have been removed one by one from the six solar fields. The photo shows the collector field on a warehouse – the buildings in the background all belong to the university.
Photo: AEE Intec

This is a study presented by members of the Swiss Institut für Solartechnik during the ISES Solar Word Congress held in Kassel, Germany (28 August - 2 September 2011). Part of the IEA SHC Task 44, the paper researches the benefits and performances of using heat from solar collectors for the evaporator of the heat pump instead of using the heat directly.

The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change commissioned this report to the consultancy AEA Technology.

The report analyses the technical costs of four heating technologies: air source heat pumps (ASHP); ground source heat pumps (GSHP); solar thermal and biomass.

The objective is to better understand these technologies in order to prepare the review process of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme. The Renewable Heat Incentive went live in 2010 and it should be reviewed every four years.

This is a presentation delivered by Enerplan during the “Setting up the Right Incentives to Boost Solar Thermal in Europe” webinar organized on November 30, 2010, within the framework of ProSTO project, funded through the Intelligent Energy Europe Programme.

This is a deliverable of the European Commission’s Altener Solar Combisystem Project, related to the IEA Task 26. The programme ran between 2001 and 2003, involving Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and The Netherlands.

This technical report is a deliverable of Task 38, Subtask C within the framework of the International Energy Agency’s Solar Heating and Cooling Programme. It describes both existing and developing simulation tools and models used for solar cooling applications.

This report was prepared within the framework of the Solar Heating and Cooling Programme (SHC) of the International Energy Agency (IEA) as an update of the one issued in 2009. The report documents the solar thermal capacity installed in the important markets worldwide and its contribution in terms of supply of energy and CO2 emissions reduction. Documented collectors comprise unglazed collectors, glazed flat-plate and evacuated tube collectors with water as the energy carrier, as well as glazed and unglazed air collectors.

This document comprises training material developed in the framework of the SDHtake-off project with the support of Intelligent Energy Europe Programme. It has been designed as a “pool” of information to be used by all training organizations. It gives a broad overview of the solar thermal technologies employed for district heating, their characteristics as well as the legislative and technical requirements that are applicable in the EU.

The 'SDHtake-off - Solar District Heating in Europe' project is a EU-funded project (under the European Commission Programme IEE Intelligent Energy Europe)supporting the market rollout of solar district heating in Europe. It started on July 2009 and runs for a period of three years. This document is one of its deliverables, describing the development of SDH capacities in Europe as a result of the existing policies and incentives.